J.I. Díaz - Böcker

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Energy Methods for Free Boundary Problems in Continuum Mechanics, held in Oviedo, Spain, 21-23 March 1994. Conservation laws and the constitutive equations of continuum mechanics lead to complicated coupled systems of partial differential equations to which, as a rule, one fails to apply the techniques, such as the maximum principle, usually employed in the studies of scalar uncoupled equations. The study of the qualitative behaviour of solutions of the systems requires different techniques, such as the so-called energy methods where the properties of some integral of a non-negative function of one or several unknowns allow one to arrive at important conclusions on the involved unknowns. This volume presents the state of the art in such a technique. Special attention is paid to the class of free boundary problems.

This book is an integrated account of modern developments in energy methods for the study of free boundary problems in partial differential equations. The theory presented has particular relevance to a number of physical applications, including heat conductivity, surface and underground water flow, gas flow, and gas filtration with absorption. The work can be divided into two parts. The first part is an exposition of the methods of several general classes of nonlinear stationary equations and systems, and the second part presents applications to the theory. +Energy Methods for Free Boundary Problems+ ((kursiv)) will appeal to applied mathematicians and graduate students whose research is in partial differential equations, nonlinear analysis, and continuum mechanics. Applications to a number of different problems arising in continuum mechanics (fluid dynamics) are presented making this book of equal interest to physicists and engineers as well.

For the past several decades, the study of free boundary problems has been a very active subject of research occurring in a variety of applied sciences. What these problems have in common is their formulation in terms of suitably posed initial and boundary value problems for nonlinear partial differential equations. Such problems arise, for example, in the mathematical treatment of the processes of heat conduction, filtration through porous media, flows of non-Newtonian fluids, boundary layers, chemical reactions, semiconductors, and so on. The growing interest in these problems is reflected by the series of meetings held under the title "Free Boundary Problems: Theory and Applications" (Ox­ ford 1974, Pavia 1979, Durham 1978, Montecatini 1981, Maubuisson 1984, Irsee 1987, Montreal 1990, Toledo 1993, Zakopane 1995, Crete 1997, Chiba 1999). From the proceedings of these meetings, we can learn about the different kinds of mathematical areas that fall within the scope of free boundary problems. It is worth mentioning that the European Science Foundation supported a vast research project on free boundary problems from 1993 until 1999. The recent creation of the specialized journal Interfaces and Free Boundaries: Modeling, Analysis and Computation gives us an idea of the vitality of the subject and its present state of development. This book is a result of collaboration among the authors over the last 15 years.