Finite-strain poro-visco-elasticity with degenerate mobility (Q6577000)

The authors consider a time horizon \(T>0\), a bounded and open domain \(\Omega \subseteq \mathbb{R}^{d}\), and the quasi-static system: \(-\operatorname{div}(\sigma _{el}(\nabla \chi ,c)+\sigma _{vi}(\nabla \chi ,\nabla \overset{.}{\chi } ,c)-\operatorname{div}\mathfrak{h}(D^{2}\chi ))=f(t)\), \(\overset{.}{c}-\operatorname{div}(\mathcal{M} (\nabla \chi ,c)\nabla \mu )=0\), in \([0,T]\times \Omega \), the total stress \( \Sigma _{tot}=\sigma _{el}+\sigma _{vi}-\operatorname{div}\mathfrak{h}\) consisting of the elastic stress \(\sigma _{el}(F,c)=\partial _{F}\Phi (F,c)\), the viscous stress \(\sigma _{vi}(F,\overset{.}{F},c)=\partial _{\overset{.}{F}}\zeta (F, \overset{.}{F},c)\), and the hyperstress \(\mathfrak{h}(G)=\partial _{G} \mathcal{H}(G)\), \(f\) is a body force, \(\mathcal{M}\) is the mobility tensor, and \(\mu (F,c)=\partial _{c}\Phi (F,c)\) is the chemical potential. The authors give two examples of such poro-visco-elastic materials. The boundary conditions \(\chi =Id\), on \(\Gamma _{D}\), \((\sigma _{el}(\nabla \chi ,c)+\sigma _{vi}(\nabla \chi ,\nabla \overset{.}{\chi },c)-\operatorname{div}_{x}(\mathfrak{ h}(D^{2}\chi ))\cdot \overrightarrow{n}=g(t)\), on \(\Gamma _{N}\), \(\mathfrak{h }(D^{2}\chi ):(\overrightarrow{n}\otimes \overrightarrow{n})=0\), on \( \partial \Omega \), and \(\mathcal{M}(\nabla \chi ,c)\nabla \mu \cdot \overrightarrow{n}=\kappa (\mu _{ext}(t)-\mu )\), on \(\partial \Omega \), are added, where \(\overrightarrow{n}\) denotes the unit normal vector on \( \partial \Omega \), \(\kappa \geq 0\) is a given permeability and \(\mu _{ext}\) is an external potential. The authors define a weak solution to this problem as a pair \((\chi ,c)\) with \(\chi \in L^{\infty }(0,T;W_{id}^{2,p}(\Omega ; \mathbb{R}^{d}))\), \(\overset{.}{\chi }\in L^{2}(0,T;H^{1}(\Omega ;\mathbb{R} ^{d}))\) and \(c\in L^{\infty }(0,T;L\log L(\Omega )))\), \(\overset{.}{c}\in L^{s}(0,T;W^{1,ss}(\Omega )^{\ast })\), and \(\nabla c^{m/2}\in L^{2}(0,T;L^{2}(\Omega ))\), and depending on the hypotheses additionally \( c\in L^{\infty }(0,T;L^{2+r}(\Omega ))\) and \(\nabla c^{m/2+1+r}\in L^{2}(0,T;L^{2}(\Omega ))\), the pair \((\chi ,c)\) satisfying variational formulations associated with the previous equations. The main result proves under hypotheses on the data the existence of a weak solution to this problem. For the proof, the authors introduce a regularized problem and a time discretization through a modified variational formulation. They prove the existence of a solution to this time-discretized and regularized problem, applying Schauder's fixed-point theorem. They then prove an energy-dissipation inequality and uniform estimates with respect to the regularizing and time discretization parameters, which allow passing to the limit.