Global existence of solutions for a free‐boundary tumor model with angiogenesis and a necrotic core

Abstract

In this paper, we study a free‐boundary problem modeling the growth of spherically symmetric tumors with angiogenesis and a necrotic core, where the Robin boundary condition is imposed for the nutrient concentration. The existence of a global solution is established by first reducing the free‐boundary problem into an equivalent initial boundary value problem for a nonlinear strongly singular parabolic equation on a fixed domain, then proving that an approximation problem admits a unique solution by the Schauder fixed point theorem combined with the estimates for parabolic equations, and finally taking the limit. Compared with the Dirichlet boundary value condition problem, the Robin condition causes some new difficulties in making rigorous analysis of the model, particularly on the uniqueness of solutions to the approximation problem.