Existence and uniqueness of weak solutions to the Smoluchowski coagulation equation with source and sedimentation

Abstract

This article is devoted to a generalized version of Smoluchowski's coagulation equation. This model describes the time evolution of a system of aggregating particles under the effect of external input and output particles. We show that for a large class of coagulation kernels, output rates, and exponentially decaying input rates, there is a weak solution. Moreover, the solution satisfies the mass-conservation property for linear coagulation rate and an additional condition on input and output rates. The uniqueness of weak solutions is also established by applying additional restrictions on the rates.