A sharp interface model for the propagation of martensitic phase boundaries (Q993343)

This paper studies the global solvability of a sharp interface model for the evolution of martensitic phase boundaries. First, the authors introduce the total energy of the body with a phase boundary separating two phases. This energy consists of the elastic energy and interfacial energies. It is postulated that the phase boundary evolution can be determined by the viscous gradient flow of the whole energy, i.e., the rate of position change of the boundary is proportional to the variation in the total energy with position. Then, the authors examine the equation for the evolution of the phase boundary which leads to a free boundary problem. The normal velocity of the phase boundary depends on both the position and the solution of an auxiliary partial differential equation for the minimizer of the elastic energy. This makes the free boundary problem nonlocal. A weak formulation of the problem in a precise statement is presented, and then a convergent finite-time discretization scheme is introduced. With this aim, for a fixed time-step, the authors consider a minimization problem for the energy. After proving the existence of such a minimizer, the minimization scheme is iteratively applied, and an approximate solution is found as an in-time piecewise constant interpolation between the minimizers for each time step. The authors show the convergence of approximate solutions, as the time step tends to zero, to a suitable solution of the original problem. In order to establish the strong convergence so that the resulting limit solution is a characteristic function, the authors prove that the total variation of the solutions is bounded uniformly in space and time. The uniform bound in space is obtained directly from a uniform bound on the perimeter of solutions. In order to derive the uniform bound in time, the elastic energy density is regularized by mollifying the transformation strain. Then the size of the mollifier vanishes with the time-step, establishing the strong convergence of the solutions. The authors use the compactness of the time discrete solutions based on the definition of the mollified transformation strain and elastic energy, and use the Fréchet-Kolmogorov theorem to establish the strong convergence of a subsequence of solutions. After proving that the sequence of discrete solutions contains a strongly converging subsequence, the authors finally prove that the limit of time discrete solutions, as the time step goes to zero, satisfies the free boundary problem in the weak sense, under a technical condition that there is no loss of surface energy.