Analysis of boundary-domain integral equations based on a new parametrix for the mixed diffusion BVP with variable coefficient in an interior Lipschitz domain (Q779265)

The authors study a mixed boundary value problem for the partial differential equation of diffusion in an inhomogeneous medium in a Lipschitz domain. More precisely, they consider a bounded simply connected Lipschitz domain \(\Omega \subseteq \mathbb{R}^3\) whose Lipschitz boundary is the disjoint union of two non-empty connected disjoint Lipschitz submanifolds \(\partial \Omega_D\) and \(\partial \Omega_N\). Then they introduce the differential operator \[ Au(x)\equiv \sum_{i=1}^{3}\frac{\partial}{\partial x_i}\Big(a(x)\frac{\partial u(x)}{\partial x_i}\Big)\, , \] where \(a(x)\) belongs to \(C^\infty (\overline{\Omega})\) and is such that \[ 0< a_{\mathrm{min}}\leq a(x)\leq a_{\mathrm{max}}<\infty\qquad \forall x \in \overline{\Omega}\, . \] Clearly, if \(a\equiv 1\), the operator \(A\) becomes the Laplacian. Then for the equation \[ Au(x)=f(x)\qquad \mathrm{in}\ \Omega\, , \] they consider a mixed problem with a Dirichlet condition on \(\partial \Omega_D\) and a Neumann condition \(\partial \Omega_N\). By means of integral operators constructed with the parametrix \[ -\frac{1}{4\pi a(x)|x-y|} \] they reduce the problem to a system of direct segregated parametrix-based boundary domain integral equations (BDIEs). They show the equivalence of the original problem and the system of BDIEs and they investigate invertibility and Fredholm properties of the boundary domain integral operators.