Non-Self-Similar Dead-Core Rate for the Fast Diffusion Equation with Dependent Coefficient

and Applied Analysis 3 Differentiating (16) once, we obtain

It is called that develops a dead-core in a finite time if < ∞, and it is shown that develops a dead-core in finite time for certain initial-boundary data (see [1, Theorem 1.1]).
Suppose that develops a dead-core in the finite time . Our main purpose of this paper is to study the temporal deadcore rate as → . For our main results on the asymptotic dead-core behaviour, we will assume that 0 satisfies the following conditions: 0 ∈ 2 ([0, 1]) , ( 0 ) ≤ 0 in (0, 1] , 0 is nondecreasing in and ( 0 ) < ∞.
It then follows from the strong maximum principle that < 0 in := (0, 1) × (0, ) and > 0 in . Here, we introduce the following self-similar transformation: Abstract and Applied Analysis The dead-core problem for the homogeneous equation in the general higher spatial dimensional case has been studied extensively in the past years. We refer the reader to, for example, [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and the references therein. In particular, for the slow diffusion (i.e., 0 < < 1 < ) and + ≥ 2 case, the self-similar singularity of dead-core rate ( − ) 1/(1− ) was shown in [5] for certain class of initial data. On the other hand, for the fast diffusion case (i.e., 0 < < < 1) or semilinear case (i.e., = 1), it is shown that the temporal dead-core rate is non-self-similar in the sense that it is always faster than the self-similar rate. Moreover, the exact dead-core rates (depending on the initial data) have been derived for the semilinear heat equation in [10] for radial symmetric case. Other singularity formation mechanisms in related reactiondiffusion equations and reaction-convection equations, such as type II blowup and gradient blowup, also exhibit non-selfsimilar behaviours, respectively. We refer to [11,12] for type II blowup and to [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] for gradient blowup for recent related results.
To study the dead-core rate for (1) with a spatially dependent absorption term, we assume further that ∈ (−1, 0) and ≥ −2 / . Let By a limiting process with some a priori estimates, we prove the following main theorem of this paper.
One of the reasons to consider the dead-core problem with variable coefficient is to investigate the effect of degeneracy on the dead-core phenomenon. In fact, a related blow-up problem for the singular equation with > 0, > 1 and the Dirichlet boundary condition, has been studied by Floater [22] and Lacey [23]. Equation (12) arises from Ockendon's model for the flow in a channel of a fluid whose viscosity is temperature dependent (see [22,23]). More generally, Wang and Zheng [24] investigated the critical Fujita exponent, that is, = + (2 + 2 )/( + 1 ), for the initial-value problem of the degenerate and singular nonlinear parabolic equation: with a nonnegative initial value, where > ≥ 1 and 0 ≤ There are certain difficulties in dealing with the spatially dependent absorption term. For example, (1) is not translation invariant due to the spatially dependent nonlinearity. In fact, Wu and Zhang [25] studied the semilinear case of (1) with = 1 and proved that the temporal dead-core rate is non-self-similar, but they did not get the uniqueness of dead-core points. In the present paper, based on Lemma 3.1 in [1] which is derived by using an integral form of maximum principles, we will obtain a precise estimate on dead-core profile and prove that the dead-core is a single point and show that the exponent essentially affects the asymptotic behaviours of dead-core. Therefore, the proofs in this paper are more delicate than those in [6,25].
This paper is organized as follows. The uniqueness of stationary solution of (8) is proved in Section 2. In Section 3, we derive some a priori estimates. Finally, we prove the main theorem (Theorem 1) in Section 4.

Uniqueness of Self-Similar Solutions
In this section, we will prove that the only nontrivial nondecreasing nonnegative stationary solution of (8) in (0, ∞) with polynomial bound is 0 .
This proves that 0 is the only positive solution of (8) in (0, ∞) such that it grows at most polynomially.

A Priori Estimates
We will derive some a priori estimates in this section. Suppose that the solution of (1)-(2) with (6) develops a dead-core in the finite time . We have the following precise estimates on the single-point final dead-core profile near = 0.

Proof of Theorem 1
In this section, we study the asymptotic behaviour of V( , ) as → ∞. For this, we define the energy functional by where V > 0, ∈ R and̂( , V) is a smooth cut-off function (defined as in [6]) of ( , V) := V 1/ − V / on R. Since ∈ (−1, 0), the function is integrable at = 0 and so ( ) is well defined. Following [6], we know that the solution of (38) can be continued backward to = 0. Moreover, by a simple computation, we obtain that where satisfies the property ∫ On the other hand, due to (25), we also obtain from (36) that Note that ( , V, ) is bounded below away from 0 for , V, in bounded sets. Also, by (25), (29), and (34), we can derive for 0 < < 1, > 0 and some Then by a standard limiting process, that is, compactness arguments, we can show that for any sequence { } tending to infinity the limit function V ∞ ( , ) := lim → ∞ V( , + ) is such that V ∞ ( , ) = V ∞ ( ) and is a nontrivial nondecreasing nonnegative stationary solution of (8) in (0, ∞). Then the uniqueness of self-similar solutions gives that V ∞ = 0 . Therefore, the conclusion follows from (25) and (34) and Lemma 2. This completes the proof of Theorem 1.

Remark 4.
We note that when < 0 we here only consider the special case of −1 < < 0 which can ensure the existence of smooth classical solutions by the parabolic regularity theory. For the case of = 0, Guo et al. [6] have studied the existence of the non-self-similar dead-core rate of the solution. However, if > 0, from the proof of Theorem 1.1 in [1] (or Theorem 2.1 in [25] for the semilinear equation) we know that the dead-core would not occur at the origin, but it may occur at some point away from the origin if the solution is not strictly increasing in . Also, it is very interesting whether the non-self-similar dead-core rate exists in this case. We leave this open question to the interested readers. Furthermore, in the higher dimensional space, it is worth to study whether assumptions could make the solution of problem (1) develop a dead-core at the origin or not. Recently, there are some interesting results of blowup problems related to these dead-core questions; we refer to [26] and the references therein for the reaction-diffusion equation with more general variable coefficient.