Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2018
This paper is concerned with a fully non-linear variant of the Allen–Cahn equation with strong irreversibility, where each solution is constrained to be non-decreasing in time. The main purposes of this paper are to prove the well-posedness, smoothing effect and comparison principle, to provide an equivalent reformulation of the equation as a parabolic obstacle problem and to reveal long-time behaviours of solutions. More precisely, by deriving partial energy-dissipation estimates, a global attractor is constructed in a metric setting, and it is also proved that each solution u(x,t) converges to a solution of an elliptic obstacle problem as t → +∞.
† G. Akagi is supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP16H03946, JP16K05199, JP17H01095, in part by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and in part by the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation.