Abstract and Applied Analysis

Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 928147, 9 pages

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/928147

Research Article

Positive Solutions of Nonlocal Boundary Value Problem for High-Order Nonlinear Fractional -Difference Equations

Changlong Yu and Jufang Wang

College of Sciences, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang, Hebei 050018, China

Received 16 July 2013; Revised 20 September 2013; Accepted 27 September 2013

Academic Editor: Dumitru Baleanu

Copyright © 2013 Changlong Yu and Jufang Wang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract.

We study the nonlinear -difference equations of fractional order , , , , , where is the fractional -derivative of the Riemann-Liouville type of order , , , , and . We obtain the existence and multiplicity results of positive solutions by using some fixed point theorems. Finally, we give examples to illustrate the results.

1. Introduction

The -difference calculus or quantum calculus is an old subject that was initially developed by Jackson [1, 2]. It is rich in history and in applications as the reader can find in the work by Ernst [3]. For some recent existence results on -difference equations, see [4–7] and the references therein.

The fractional -difference calculus had its origin in the works by Al-Salam and Agarwal. Henceforth, fractional -difference equations have gained considerable importance due to their application in various sciences, such as physics, chemistry, aerodynamics, biology, economics, control theory, mechanics, electricity, signal and image processing, biophysics, blood flow phenomena, and fitting of experimental data. It has been a significant development in difference equations involving fractional -derivatives; see [8–11] and references therein. As well known, fractional differential equations boundary value problems is currently under strong research, see [12–21] and references therein. In particular, in recent years, fractional -difference boundary value problem (BVP) was in its infancy, and many people begin to study the existence of positive solutions for this kind of BVP; see [22–27] and references therein. However, there are few related results available. Lots of work and development should be done in the future.

Recently, in [16], Li et al. considered the BVP of nonlinear fractional difference equation

where , , , , and satisfies Caratheodory type conditions.

More recently, in [23], Ferreira considered the BVP of fractional -difference equation

where and is a nonnegative continuous function.

Motivated by the work above, in this paper, we will discuss the following BVP:

where , , , , and satisfies Caratheodory type conditions. We discuss the existence of positive solutions for BVP(3) and obtain multiplicity results which extend and improve the known results by using some fixed point theorems.

2. Preliminary Results

In this section, we introduce definitions and preliminary facts which are used throughout this paper.

Let and define

The -analogue of the power function with is

More generally, if , then

Note that, if , then . The -gamma function is defined by

and satisfies .

Then, let us recall some basic concepts of -calculus [28].

Definition 1. For , we define the -derivative of a real-value function as

Note that .

Definition 2. The higher-order -derivatives are defined inductively as

Definition 3. The -integral of a function in the interval is given by

If and is defined in the interval , its integral from to is defined by

Similarly as done for derivatives, an operator can be defined; namely,

Observe that

and if is continuous at , then .

We now point out three formulas ( denotes the derivative with respect to variable ):

Remark 4. We note that if and , then [19].

Definition 5 (see [9]). Let and let be a function defined on . The fractional -integral of the Riemann-Liouville type is and

Definition 6 (see [11]). The fractional -derivative of the Riemann-Liouville type of is defined by and

where is the smallest integer greater than or equal to .

Lemma 7 (see [9, 11]). Let and let be a function defined on . Then, the next formulas hold:

(1), (2).

Remark 8. Assume that and are two constants such that . Then

Proof. From Lemma 7, we can get

so

that is, (17) holds. The proof is completed.

Lemma 9 (see [22]). Let and let be a positive integer. Then, the following equality holds:

Lemma 10. Let ; then the unique solution of

is

where

where .

Proof. Let be a solution of (21); in view of Lemma 7 and Lemma 9, (21) is equivalent to the integral equation

where are some constants to be determined. The boundary conditions , , imply that . Thus,

By Remark 8, we have

For ,

Hence,

The proof is complete.

Remark 11. For the special case where , it is easy to see that can be written as

Lemma 12. Green function in Lemma 10 satisfies the following conditions:

(i) for ;(ii) for ;(iii) for .

Proof. Let

We first prove part (i). For , from Remark 4, for ,

Since , it is easy to know , , and . Therefore, .

Next, we prove part (ii). Fix , and

That is, is increasing function of . By the same way, we can conclude that , , and are increasing functions of for fixed . Thus, for .

Finally, we prove part (iii). Suppose that ; then

For other circumstances, we also get and this completes the proof.

Remark 13. Let ; then and

Lemma 14 (see [29]). Let be a Banach space with being closed and convex. Assume that is a relatively open subset of with and is complete continuous. Then either

(i) has a fixed point in , or(ii)there exist and with .

Lemma 15 (see Krasnoselskii’s [30]). Let be a Banach space, and is a cone in . Assume that and are open subsets of with and . Let be a completely continuous operator. In addition, suppose that either

, for all and , for all or, for all and , for all

holds. Then has a fixed point in .

Lemma 16 (see [31]). Let be a cone in a real Banach space , , is a nonnegative continuous concave functional on such that , for all , and . Suppose that is completely continuous and there exist positive constants such that

and for , for , for with .

Then has at least three fixed points , and with

Remark 17. If , then () implies ().

3. Main Result

In this section, we will consider the question of positive solutions for BVP (3). At first, we prove some lemmas required for the main result.

Let be the Banach space endowed with the norm . Let for a given , and define the cone by

Let the nonnegative continuous concave functional on the cone be defined by

In this paper, we assume that satisfies the following conditions of Caratheodory type:

is Lebesgue measurable with respect to on ; is continuous with respect to on .

Theorem 18. Assume that the conditions and hold. Suppose further that there exists a real-valued function such that for almost every and all . If

then there exist unique positive solutions of BVP (3) on .

Proof. Consider the operator defined by

For any , we have

This implies that is a contraction mapping. By the Banach contraction mapping principle, we deduce that has a unique fixed point which is obviously a solution of BVP (3). The proof is complete.

Corollary 19. Assume that the conditions and hold. Suppose further that there exists a positive constant with , where

then there exists a unique positive solution of BVP (3) on .

Corollary 20. Assume that the conditions and hold. Suppose further that there exists a real-valued function such that , , . If

then there exists a unique positive solution of BVP (3) on .

Corollary 21. Assume that the conditions and hold. Suppose further that there exists a positive constant with , , ; then there exists a unique positive solution of BVP (3) on .

Next, we discuss multiple solutions of BVP (3).

Lemma 22. Assume that the conditions and hold. Suppose further that there exist two nonnegative real-valued functions such that for almost every and all . Then the operation defined by (39) is completely continuous.

Proof. We will divide the proof into three parts.

(I) We show that is continuous.

For any , , with , we have

Thus

So, we can obtain that

On the other hand, we have

It implies that

Therefore, as . This means that is continuous.

(II) We will prove that maps bounded sets into bounded sets in .

For any , there exists a positive constant such that for each , we have . By the definition of , for each , we get

That is, .

(III) We will show that maps bounded sets into equicontinuous sets of .

Let be a bounded set, and . For any , we have

Since is continuous on , then is uniformly continuous in . Hence, for any , there exists , whenever , and we have

So ; that is, is equicontinuous.

By Arzela-Ascoli theorem, we can conclude that is completely continuous. This completes the proof.

Remark 23. If is continuous, is also completely continuous.

Theorem 24. Assume that all the assumptions of Lemma 22 hold. If

then BVP (3) has at least one positive solution.

Proof. Let , where

and . From Lemma 22, is completely continuous.

Assume that there exist and such that ; we claim that :

and then

That is, . By Lemma 14, has a fixed point . Therefore, BVP (3) has at least a positive solution. The proof is complete.

In the following, we set

Theorem 25. Assume that all the assumptions of Lemma 22 hold. If there exist two positive constants such that

then BVP (3) has at least one positive solution.

Proof. Because is completely continuous, we just only show that has a solution for .

Let . For any , we know on . Using (56) and (34), we have

which implies that , .

Let . For any , we get on . Using (57), we have

that is, , .

In view of Lemma 15, has a fixed point which is the solution of BVP (3).

Theorem 26. Assume that all assumptions of Lemma 22 hold. If there exist constants such that

hold, then BVP (3) has at least three positive solutions , and with

Proof. First, if , then . So , . By , we have

which implies that . Hence, . In view of Lemma 22, is completely continuous.

By using the analogous argument, from , we can get that if , then .

Set , , so , . Therefore, .

On the other hand, if , then . By , we have

which implies that , for .

By Lemma 16, BVP(3) has at least three positive solutions , , and with

The proof is complete.

4. Example

Example 27. Consider the following BVP:

Let , , , so , for .

By simple calculation, we get

All conditions of Theorem 18 are satisfied. Thus, BVP (65) has a unique positive solution.

Example 28. Consider the following BVP:

Let , . It is easy to check that for . Since

by Theorem 24, BVP (67) has at least one positive solution.

Example 29. Consider the following BVP:

Let , . By calculation, we get

Choosing , , we have

By Theorem 25, BVP (69) has at least one positive solution such that .

Example 30. Consider the following BVP:

Here,

By Example 29, we have

Choosing , , , we have

By Theorem 26, BVP (72) has at least three solutions , , and such that

5. Conclusion

In this paper, we obtain the existence and multiplicity results of positive solutions of BVP for high-order fractional -difference equations by some fixed point theorems, which enrich the theories for fractional -difference equations, and provide the theoretical guarantee for the application of fractional -difference equations in every field. In the future, we will use bifurcation theory, critical point theory, variational method, and other methods to continue our works in this area.

Conflict of Interests

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

Authors’ Contribution

Each of the authors, Changlong Yu and Jufang Wang, contributed to each part of this work equally and read and approved the final version of the paper.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China ((10901045) and (11201112)) and the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province ((A2013208147) and (A2011208012)).

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