Allen–Cahn equation with strong irreversibility

Abstract

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 derivingpartialenergy-dissipation estimates, a global attractor is constructed in a metric setting, and it is also proved that each solutionu(x,t) converges to a solution of an elliptic obstacle problem ast→ +∞.