Existence of variational solutions to doubly nonlinear systems in general noncylindrical domains

Abstract

We consider the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem to doubly nonlinear systems of the form \begin{align*} \partial_t \big( |u|^{q-1}u \big) - \operatorname{div} \big( D_\xi f(x,u,Du) \big) = - D_u f(x,u,Du) \end{align*} with $q \in (0, \infty)$ in a bounded noncylindrical domain $E \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$. Further, we suppose that $x \mapsto f(x,u,\xi)$ is integrable, that $(u,\xi) \mapsto f(x,u,\xi)$ is convex, and that $f$ satisfies a $p$-growth and -coercivity condition for some $p>\max \big\{ 1,\frac{n(q+1)}{n+q+1} \big\}$. Merely assuming that $\mathcal{L}^{n+1}(\partial E) = 0$, we prove the existence of variational solutions $u \in L^\infty\big( 0,T;L^{q+1}(E,\mathbb{R}^N)\big)$. If $E$ does not shrink too fast, we show that for the solution $u$ constructed in the first step, $\vert u \vert^{q-1}u$ admits a distributional time derivative. Moreover, under suitable conditions on $E$ and the stricter lower bound $p \geq \frac{(n+1)(q+1)}{n+q+1}$, $u$ is continuous with respect to time.