Weak and stationary solutions to a Cahn–Hilliard–Brinkman model with singular potentials and source terms

• Main Authors: Ebenbeck Matthias, Lam Kei Fong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2020-05-01
• Series: Advances in Nonlinear Analysis
• Subjects: tumour growth; brinkman’s law; darcy’s law; singular potentials; stationary solutions; cahn–hilliard inpainting; 35k35; 35d30; 35j61; 35q92; 92c50; 76d07
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/anona-2020-0100

We study a phase field model proposed recently in the context of tumour growth. The model couples a Cahn–Hilliard–Brinkman (CHB) system with an elliptic reaction-diffusion equation for a nutrient. The fluid velocity, governed by the Brinkman law, is not solenoidal, as its divergence is a function of the nutrient and the phase field variable, i.e., solution-dependent, and frictionless boundary conditions are prescribed for the velocity to avoid imposing unrealistic constraints on the divergence relation. In this paper we give a first result on the existence of weak and stationary solutions to the CHB model for tumour growth with singular potentials, specifically the double obstacle potential and the logarithmic potential, which ensures that the phase field variable stays in the physically relevant interval. New difficulties arise from the interplay between the singular potentials and the solution-dependent source terms, but can be overcome with several key estimates for the approximations of the singular potentials, which maybe of independent interest. As a consequence, included in our analysis is an existence result for a Darcy variant, and our work serves to generalise recent results on weak and stationary solutions to the Cahn–Hilliard inpainting model with singular potentials.