Well-posedness of an extended model for water-ice phase transitions

TL;DR

This paper introduces an advanced mathematical model for water-ice phase transitions that accounts for variable specific heat and sound speed, establishing existence, bounds, and uniqueness of solutions despite nonlinear complexities.

Contribution

It extends existing models by incorporating phase-dependent nonlinearities, providing rigorous mathematical proofs for solution existence and properties.

Findings

Proved global existence of solutions

Established temperature bounds

Demonstrated solution uniqueness and stability

Abstract

We propose an improved model explaining the occurrence of high stresses due to the difference in specific volumes during phase transitions between water and ice. The unknowns of the resulting evolution problem are the absolute temperature, the volume increment, and the liquid fraction. The main novelty here consists in including the dependence of the specific heat and of the speed of sound upon the phase. These additional nonlinearities bring new mathematical difficulties which require new estimation techniques based on Moser iteration. We establish the existence of a global solution to the corresponding initial-boundary value problem, as well as lower and upper bounds for the absolute temperature. Assuming constant heat conductivity, we also prove uniqueness and continuous data dependence of the solution.