Blow-up set for a superlinear heat equation and pointedness of the initial data (Q476571)

The author of this interesting paper studies the blow-up problem for a superlinear heat equation \[ \partial_t u = \epsilon\triangle u + f (u), \;\;x\in\Omega , \;\;t > 0, \] under the boundary condition \(u(x, t) = 0\), \(x \in\partial\Omega \), \(t > 0\) (\(\partial\Omega = \emptyset \)), and the initial condition \(u(x, 0)=\varphi (x)\geq 0\), \(x\in\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^N \), \(N\geq 1\), where \(\partial_t\equiv \partial /\partial t\), \(\epsilon >0\), \(\Omega \) is a (possibly unbounded) domain, \(\varphi\in L^{\infty }(\Omega )\), and \(f\in C^2([0,\infty ))\cap C^1([0,\infty ))\) is a positive convex function in \((0,\infty )\) satisfying \(\int\limits_{1}^{\infty }{ds\over f(s)} <\infty \). It is assumed that the derivatives \(f^{(k)}(u)>0\) (\(k=0,1,2\)) for \(u\in (0,\infty )\) satisfy \[ \lim\sup\limits_{u\to\infty }f^{'}(u)F(u)<\infty, \lim\sup\limits_{u\to\infty }{f(u+1)\over f(u)}<\infty, \] where \[ F_{f}(u)=\int\limits_{u}^{\infty }{ds\over f(s)}. \] Define the set \(BC_{+}(\overline{\Omega } )\) of nonnegative bounded continuous functions on \(\overline{\Omega }\). Introduce the maximal existence time \(T_{\epsilon }\) of the classical solution \(u_{\epsilon }\) of the above stated problem, that is the blow-up time, since \(\lim\sup\limits_{t\to T_{\epsilon }}\|u_{\epsilon }(t)\|_{L^{\infty }(\Omega )}= \infty \), and introduce also the corresponding blow-up set \(B_{\epsilon }\). The main result in the paper is stated under the requirement that \(\varphi\in BC_{+}(\overline{\Omega })\cap C^2(\Omega )\) and \(f \in C^2((0,\infty ))\cap C^1([0,\infty ))\) is a positive function in \((0,\infty )\) satisfying the above stated conditions, and that there exists a positive constant \(\epsilon_{\ast }\) such that \(M(\varphi , \epsilon_{\ast })\) is a compact subset of \(\Omega \) and at the same time exists the constant \(c_{\ast }>0\) such that the solution \(u_{\epsilon }\) of the initial and the boundary value problem stated above satisfies the estimate \(\|u_{\epsilon }(t)\|_{L^{\infty }(\Omega )} \leq F_{f}^{-1}(c_{\ast }(T_{\epsilon }-t))\) for all \(t\in (0,T_{\epsilon })\). Then, there exists a constant \(C_{\ast }>0\) and a set \(B_{\epsilon }\) which is subset of \(\{x\in\overline{\Omega }: \;\varphi (x)\geq \|\varphi \|_{L^{\infty }(\Omega )}- \epsilon C_{\ast }\}\) for all sufficiently small \(\epsilon > 0\). A corollary follows under the same conditions and if in addition a set \(M(\varphi )=\{\alpha ,\beta \}\) exists and \(|\triangle \varphi (\alpha )|< |\triangle \varphi (\beta )|\), then the solution \(u_{\epsilon }\) blows up only near the point \(\alpha \) for sufficiently small \(\epsilon > 0\).