Local well-posedness of a coupled Jordan-Moore-Gibson-Thompson-Pennes model of nonlinear ultrasonic heating

Abstract

In this work, we investigate a mathematical model of nonlinear ultrasonic heating based on the Jordan-Moore-Gibson-Thompson equation (JMGT) with temperature-dependent medium parameters coupled to the semilinear Pennes equation for the bioheat transfer. The equations are coupled via the temperature in the coefficients of the JMGT equation and via a nonlinear source term within the Pennes equation, which models the absorption of acoustic energy by the surrounding tissue. Using the energy method together with a fixed point argument, we prove that our model is locally well-posed, provided that the initial data are regular, small in a lower topology and the final time is short enough.