On an Anisotropic Fractional Stefan-Type Problem with Dirichlet Boundary Conditions

TL;DR

This paper studies a fractional Stefan-type problem with anisotropic operators, establishing existence, uniqueness, and analyzing asymptotic behaviors and convergence to classical models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel anisotropic fractional operator framework for Stefan problems, proving existence, uniqueness, and convergence results.

Findings

Existence and uniqueness of weak solutions.

Convergence to classical local Stefan problem as s approaches 1.

Asymptotic behavior of solutions as time tends to infinity.

Abstract

In this work, we consider the fractional Stefan-type problem in a Lipschitz bounded domain $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^d$ with time-dependent Dirichlet boundary condition for the temperature $\vartheta=\vartheta(x,t)$, $\vartheta=g$ on $\Omega^c\times]0,T[$, and initial condition $\eta_0$ for the enthalpy $\eta=\eta(x,t)$, given in $\Omega\times]0,T[$ by \[\frac{\partial \eta}{\partial t} +\mathcal{L}_A^s \vartheta= f\quad\text{ with }\eta\in \beta(\vartheta),\] where $\mathcal{L}_A^s$ is an anisotropic fractional operator defined in the distributional sense by \[\langle\mathcal{L}_A^su,v\rangle=\int_{\mathbb{R}^d}AD^su\cdot D^sv\,dx,\] $\beta$ is a maximal monotone graph, $A(x)$ is a symmetric, strictly elliptic and uniformly bounded matrix, and $D^s$ is the distributional Riesz fractional gradient for $0<s<1$. We show the existence of a unique weak solution with its corresponding weak regularity. We also consider the convergence as $s\nearrow 1$ towards the classical local problem, the asymptotic behaviour as $t\to\infty$, and the convergence of the two-phase Stefan-type problem to the one-phase Stefan-type problem by varying the maximal monotone graph $\beta$.