Degenerate diffusion with Preisach hysteresis

Abstract

Fluid diffusion in unsaturated porous media manifests strong hysteresis effects due to surface tension on the liquid-gas interface. We describe hysteresis in the pressure-saturation relation by means of the Preisach operator, which makes the resulting evolutionary PDE strongly degenerate. We prove the existence and uniqueness of a strong global solution in arbitrary space dimension using a special weak convexity concept.