Blow-up phenomena and lifespan for a quasi-linear pseudo-parabolic equation at arbitrary initial energy level

In this paper, we continue to study the initial boundary value problem of the quasi-linear pseudo-parabolic equation

which was studied by Peng et al. (Appl. Math. Lett. 56:17–22, 2016), where the blow-up phenomena and the lifespan for the initial energy \(J(u_{0})<0\) were obtained. We establish the finite time blow-up of the solution for the initial data at arbitrary energy level and the lifespan of the blow-up solution. Furthermore, as a product, we obtain the blow-up rate and refine the lifespan when \(J(u_{0})<0\).

In this paper, we investigate the initial boundary value problem of the following quasi-linear pseudo-parabolic equation:

where \(\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^{n}\) (\(n\geq3\)) is a bounded domain with sufficiently smooth boundary ∂Ω, \(p>1\) and \(0\leq 2q< p-1\). \(T\in(0, \infty]\) denotes the maximal existence time of the solution.

Problem (1.1) describes a variety of important physical and biological phenomena such as the aggregation of population [1], the unidirectional propagation of nonlinear, dispersive, long waves [2], and the nonstationary processes in semiconductors [3]. In the absence of the term \(\operatorname{div}(|\nabla u|^{2q}\nabla u)\), Eq. (1.1) reduces to the following semilinear pseudo-parabolic equation:

There are many results for Eq. (1.2) such as the existence and uniqueness in [4], blow-up in [5–8], asymptotic behavior in [6, 9], and so on. Using the integral representation and the semigroup, Cao et al.[10] obtained the critical global existence exponent and the critical Fujita exponent for Eq. (1.2). Chen et al. [11] considered Eq. (1.2) with the logarithmic nonlinearity source term by the potential well methods.

Recently, Peng et al. [12] considered the blow-up phenomena on problem (1.1). By the way, Payne et al. [13] considered the blow-up phenomena of solutions on the initial boundary problem of the nonlinear parabolic equation

In addition, Long et al. [14] investigated the blow-up phenomena for a nonlinear pseudo-parabolic equation with nonlocal source

Finally, we mention some interesting works concerning quasi-linear or degenerate parabolic equations. For example, Winkert and Zacher [15] considered a generate class of quasi-linear parabolic problems and established global a priori bounds for the weak solutions of such problems; Fragnelli and Mugnai [16] established Carleman estimates for degenerate parabolic equations with interior degeneracy and non-smooth coefficients.

Throughout this paper, we use \(\|\cdot\|_{p}= (\int_{\Omega}|\cdot |^{p}\, dx )^{\frac{1}{p}}\) and \(\|\cdot\|_{W_{0}^{1,p}}= (\int_{\Omega }(|\cdot|^{p}+|\nabla\cdot|^{p})\,dx )^{\frac{1}{p}}\) as the norms on the Banach spaces \(L^{p}=L^{p}(\Omega)\) and \(W_{0}^{1, p}=W_{0}^{1, p}(\Omega)\), respectively. As in [12], we define the energy functional and the Nehari functional of (1.1), respectively, by

Let \(\lambda_{1}\) be the first nontrivial eigenvalue of −△ operator in Ω with homogeneous Dirichlet condition, then we have

In order to compare with our work, in this paper, we summarize the blow-up results obtained in [12] as follows.

(RES1) If \(0\leq2q< p-1\), \(J(u_{0})<0\), and u is a nonnegative solution of (1.1), then u blows up at some finite time T, where T is bounded by

From the above (RES1), we notice that (1) the blow-up rate is not given when \(J(u_{0})<0\); (2) the blow-up phenomena and the lifespan are still unsolved when \(J(u_{0})\geq0\).

Motivated by the above-mentioned facts, we investigate these two problems in this paper. Firstly, we state the local existence theorem of problem (1.1) by Faedo–Galerkin method (see Theorem 2.1 in [12]).

(RES2) For any \(u_{0}\in W_{0}^{1,2q+2}(\Omega)\), there exists \(T>0\) such that problem (1.1) has a unique local weak solution \(u\in L^{\infty}(0,T;W_{0}^{1, 2q+2}(\Omega))\) with \(u_{t}\in L^{2}(0,T; H_{0}^{1}(\Omega))\) which satisfies

for all \(v\in W_{0}^{1, 2q+2}(\Omega)\).

Our main result of this paper can be stated as the following theorem.

Theorem 1.1

For all \(0\leq2q< p-1\), the nonnegative solution u of problem (1.1) blows up at finite time in \(H_{0}^{1}\)-norm provided that

Furthermore, the lifespan T can be estimated by

Remark 1.1

For the case \(J(u_{0})<0\), the initial data condition given in (1.7) is obviously satisfied. Noticing the values of \(T_{1}\) and \(T_{2}\) given in (1.6) and (1.8), we can refine the lifespan T as

In this section, we prove Theorem 1.1 by using the following lemma (see [17]).

Lemma 2.1

Suppose that a nonnegative, twice-differentiable function \(\theta(t)\) satisfies the inequality

where \(r>0\) is some constant. If \(\theta(0) > 0\) and \(\theta'(0)>0\), then there exists \(0 < t_{1}\leq\frac{\theta(0)}{r\theta'(0)}\) such that \(\theta(t)\rightarrow+\infty\) as \(t\rightarrow t_{1}^{-}\).

Proof of Theorem 1.1

We give the proof in the following two steps.

Step 1: Blow-up. Let \(u(t)\) be the solution of problem (1.1) with the initial data satisfying (1.7). We may assume \(J(u(t))\geq0\); otherwise, there exists some \(t_{0}\geq0\) such that \(J(u(t_{0}))<0\), then \(u(t)\) will blow up in finite time by (RES1), the proof of this step is complete. So, in the following, we give our proof by contradiction and assume that \(u(t)\) exists globally and \(J(u(t))\geq0\) for all \(t\geq0\).

Differentiating (1.3) and making use of (1.1) and (1.4), we have the following equalities:

Since

by Hölder’s inequality, (2.1), and \(J(u_{0})\geq J(u(t))\geq0\), we obtain that

Combining (1.5) and Hölder’s inequality, we deduce that

On the other hand, by (1.3), (1.4), (2.2), and \(0\leq 2q< p-1\), we obtain

Since \(\frac{d}{dt}(J(u(t)))\leq0\), it follows from the above inequality that

Let

then

for all \(t\geq0\). By using Gronwall’s inequality, we get

Noticing that \(H(0)>0\) via (1.7) and the assumption \(J(u(t))\geq 0\) for \(t\geq0\), we deduce

which is a contradiction with (2.3) for t sufficiently large. Hence, \(u(t)\) blows up at some finite time, i.e., \(T<\infty\).

Step 2: Lifespan. We will find an upper bound for T. Firstly, we claim that

Indeed, combining (1.3) and (1.4), after a simple calculation, we get

It follows from (1.5), (1.7), and (2.5) that

where we also use \(0\leq2q< p-1\), which implies \(I(u_{0})<0\). Hence, if (2.4) does not hold, there must exist \(t_{0}\in(0,T)\) such that \(I(u(t_{0}))=0\), \(I(u(t))<0\) for \(t\in[0,t_{0})\). Then, by (2.2), we obtain that \(\|u(t)\|_{H_{0}^{1}}^{2}\) is strictly increasing on \([0, t_{0})\). Then it follows from (1.7) that

On the other hand, combining (2.1) and (2.5), we get

which is a contradiction with (2.6). Hence, \(I(u(t))<0\) and \(\| u(t)\|_{H_{0}^{1}}^{2}\) is strictly increasing on \([0, T)\).

We define the functional

with two positive constants β, γ to be chosen later. Since \(\|u(t)\|_{H_{0}^{1}}^{2}\) is strictly increasing, we get

and

Noticing that

and

by using Young’s inequality, Hölder’s inequality, and the element algebraic inequality

we can deduce

Hence, it follows from the above inequality and (2.7) that

By the above equality, (2.8), and the fact that \(\|u(t)\| _{H_{0}^{1}}^{2}\) is strictly increasing, we have

From (1.7), we can choose β sufficiently small such that

Then the conditions of Lemma 2.1 are satisfied with \(r=\frac{p-1}{2}\), so we have

Fixing arbitrary β satisfying (2.9), then let γ be sufficiently large such that

then it follows from (2.10) that

Define a function \(T_{\beta}(\gamma)\) by

It is easy to prove that the function \(T_{\beta}(\gamma)\) has a unique minimum at

Then it follows from (2.11) that

for any β satisfying (2.9). Finally, we obtain

This completes the proof of Theorem 1.1. □

Corollary 2.1

For all \(0\leq2q< p-1\) and any \(M>0\), there exists initial \(u_{0M}\in W_{0}^{1, 2q+2}(\Omega)\) such that the weak solution for corresponding problem (1.1) will blow up in finite time.

Proof

Let \(M>0\), and \(\Omega_{1}\) and \(\Omega_{2}\) be two arbitrary disjoint open subdomains of Ω. We assume that \(v\in W_{0}^{1, 2q+2}(\Omega _{1})\subset W_{0}^{1, 2q+2}(\Omega)\subset H_{0}^{1}(\Omega)\) is an arbitrary nonzero function, then we can take \(\alpha_{1}>0\) sufficiently large such that

We claim that there exist \(w\in W_{0}^{1, 2q+2}(\Omega_{2})\subset W_{0}^{1, 2q+2}(\Omega) \) and \(\alpha>\alpha_{1}\) such that \(J(w)=M-J(\alpha v)\).

In fact, we choose a function \(w_{k}\in C_{0}^{1}(\Omega_{2})\) such that \(\| \nabla w_{k}\|_{2}\geq k\) and \(\|w_{k}\|_{\infty}\leq c_{0}\). Hence,

On the other hand, since \(0\leq2q< p-1\), it holds that

Hence, there exist \(k>0\) and \(\alpha>\alpha_{1}\) both sufficiently large such that

Then we choose \(w=w_{k}\) and denote \(u_{0M}:=\alpha v+w\). Hence, we have

and

The proof is complete. □

Remark 2.1

In this remark, we establish the blow-up rate for \(J(u_{0})<0\). We define the functionals \(\varphi(t)=\|u(t)\|_{H_{0}^{1}}^{2}\) and \(\psi(t)=-2(p+1)J(u(t))\) as these in [12]. It was shown in (4.8) of [12] that

Now, we integrate the inequality from t to T, noticing \(\lim_{t\rightarrow T^{-}}\varphi(t)=+\infty\) (by (RES1)), we obtain

Then it follows from the definitions of \(\varphi(t)\) and \(\psi(t)\) that

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the referees for the careful reading of this paper and for the valuable suggestions to improve the presentation and the style of the paper.

Availability of data and materials

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Funding

This work was supported by Key Scientific Research Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Henan Province, China (Grant No. 19A110004).

Affiliations

1. College of Science, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China

   • Gongwei Liu
   •  & Ruimin Zhao

Contributions

All authors contributed to each part of this work equally and read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gongwei Liu.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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