International Journal of Differential Equations
Volume 2019 (2019), Article ID 2893857, 9 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/2893857

Research Article

Positive Solutions for a Coupled System of Nonlinear Semipositone Fractional Boundary Value Problems

S. Nageswara Rao and M. Zico Meetei

Department of Mathematics, Jazan University, Jazan, Saudi Arabia

Correspondence should be addressed to S. Nageswara Rao; snrao@jazanu.edu.sa

Received 15 September 2018; Revised 22 December 2018; Accepted 31 December 2018; Published 3 February 2019

Academic Editor: Peiguang Wang

Copyright © 2019 S. Nageswara Rao and M. Zico Meetei. 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.

In this paper, we consider a four-point coupled boundary value problem for system of the nonlinear semipositone fractional differential equation , , , where the coefficients are real positive constants, , are the standard Riemann-Liouville derivatives. Values of the parameters and are determined for which boundary value problem has positive solution by utilizing a fixed point theorem on cone.

1. Introduction

In recent years, fractional-order calculus has been one of the most rapidly developing areas of mathematical analysis. In fact, a natural phenomenon may depend not only on the time instant but also on the previous time history, which can be successfully modeled by fractional calculus. Fractional-order differential equations are naturally related to systems with memory, as fractional derivatives are usually nonlocal operators. Thus, fractional differential equations (FDEs) play an important role because of their applications in various fields of science, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, optimal control theory, finance, biology, and engineering [1–6]. In particular, a great interest has been shown by many authors in the subject of fractional-order boundary value problems (BVPs), and a variety of results for BVPs equipped with different kinds of boundary conditions have been obtained; for instance, see [7–18] and the references cited therein.

We consider the four-point coupled system of nonlinear fractional differential equations:

with the coupled boundary conditions

where , and are the standard Riemann-Liouville derivatives, and are real positive constants.

Here we emphasize that our problem is new in the sense of nonseparated coupled boundary conditions introduced here. To the best of our knowledge, fractional-order coupled system (1) has yet to be studied with the boundary conditions (2). In consequence, our findings of the present work will be a useful contribution to the existing literature on the topic. The existence of positive solution results for the given problem is new, though they are proved by applying the well-known fixed point theorem.

We present intervals for parameters , and such that the above problem (1)-(2) has at least one positive solution. By a positive solution (1)-(2), we mean a pair of functions satisfying (1) and (2) with for all and

We use the following notations for our convenience:

Before stating our results, we make precise assumptions throughout the paper:

(H1)The functions and there exist functions such that and for any and (H2) are positive constants such that (H3) for all .(H4)The functions , may be singular at andor , and there exist functions , such that for all , with (H5)There exists such that

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we construct the Green functions for the associated linear fractional-order boundary value problems and estimate the bounds for these Green functions. In Section 3, we establish the existence of at least one positive solution of the boundary value problem (1)-(2) by applying fixed point theorem. Finally, as an application, we give an example to illustrate our result.

2. Green Functions and Bounds

In this section, we construct the Green functions for the associated linear fractional-order boundary value problems and estimate the bounds for these Green functions, which are needed to establish the main results.

Lemma 1. Let Then, the differential equation has a solution

for some , where is the smallest integer greater than or equal to .

Lemma 2. Let Then, for some , where is the smallest integer greater than or equal to .

Lemma 3. Let and . Let be given functions. Then, the boundary value problem,

has an integral representation

where

Lemma 4. Assume that condition is satisfied. Then, the Green functions and defined, respectively, by (8) and (10) are nonnegative, for all

Lemma 5. Assume that condition is satisfied. Then, the Green functions and defined, respectively, by (9) and (11) are nonnegative, for all

Lemma 6. Assume that condition is satified. Then, the Green functions and defined, respectively, by (8) and (10) have the following properties:

, for all ,, , for all , where

Lemma 7. Assume that condition is satified. Then, the Green functions and defined, respectively, by (9) and (11) have the following properties:

and for all , and , for all , where

In the proof of our main results, we shall use the nonlinear alternative of Leray-Schauder type and the Guo-Krasnosel’skii fixed point theorem presented below [19, 20].

Theorem 8. Let be a Banach space with closed and convex. Assume is a relatively open subset of with , and let be a completely continuous operator (continuous and compact). Then, either

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

Theorem 9 (). Let be a Banach space, and let be a cone in . Assume that and are two bounded open subsets of with , and let be a completely continuous operator such that either

(i), and , or(ii), and .

Then, has a fixed point in .

3. Main Results

In this section, we investigate the existence of positive solutions for our problem (1)-(2).

We consider the system of nonlinear fractional differential equations

with the boundary conditions

where a modified function for any by

Here with

is solution of the system of fractional differential equations

with the boundary conditions

Under the assumptions and or and , we have for all

We shall prove that there exists a solution for the boundary value problem (12)-(13) with and on on In this case, with and represents a positive solution of boundary value problem (1)-(2).

By using Lemma 3, a solution of the system

is a solution for problem (12)-(13).

We consider the Banach space with supremum norm and the Banach space with the norm We define the cone

where .

For , we define the operators and defined by with

It is clear that if is a fixed point of operator , then is a solution of problem (12)-(13).

Lemma 10. If and or and hold, then operator is a completely continuous operator.

Proof. The operators and are well defined. To prove this, let be fixed with Then we have

If and hold, then we deduce easily that and for all If and hold, we deduce, for all :

where ,
Thus, is well defined.
Next, we show that For any fixed , by Lemmas 6 and 7, we have

Similarly, Therefore,

Hence, This implies that According to the Ascoli-Arzela theorem, we can easily get that is completely continuous.

Theorem 11. Assume that hold. Then, there exist constants and such that, for any and , the boundary value problem (1)-(2) has at least one positive solution.

Proof. Let be fixed. From and , there exist such that

We define

We will show that, for any and , problem (12)-(13) has at least one positive solution.
So, let and be arbitrary but fixed for the moment. We define the set We suppose that there exist or and such that or .
We deduce that

Then by Lemma 3, for all , we obtain

Hence, and Then, , which is contradiction.
Therefore, by Theorem 8 (with ), we deduce that has a fixed point That is, or , and with and for all Moreover, by (25), we conclude

Therefore, for all , and for all Let and for all Then, for all for all Therefore, is a positive solution of (1)-(2).

Theorem 12. Assume that , and hold. Then, there exist and such that, for any and , the boundary value problem (1)-(2) has at least one positive solution.

Proof. We choose a positive number

and we define the set
We introduce

with

Let and Then, for any and , we have

Then, for any , we obtain

Therefore,

On the other hand, we choose a constant such that

From , we deduce that there exists a constant such that

Now we define

and let
We suppose that , that is, for all and Then, for any , we have or We deduce that or .
We suppose that . Then, for any , we obtain

Therefore, we conclude

Hence,

Then, for any and , by (37) and (41), we deduce

It follows that, for any , we obtain

Then, and

If , then by a similar approach, we obtain again relation (44).
We suppose that , that is, , for all and Then, for any , we have Hence, or .
If , then for any we deduce in a similar manner as above that for all and

Hence, we obtain relation (44). If , then in a similar way as above, we deduce again relation (44). Therefore, by Theorem 9, relation (35), and (44), we conclude that has a fixed point

4. Example

In this section, we give an example to illustrating our result. Let

Consider the system of fractional differential equations,

where We have for all , and then assumption is satisfied. Besides, assumption is also satisfied, because and for all . Let and Then , . In addition,

We also obtain , , , , , , , and then , . We can apply Theorem 11. So we conclude that there exist such that, for every and , the boundary value problem (47) has at least one positive solution.

5. Conclusions

This paper studies the existence of positive solution of a four-point coupled system of nonlinear fractional differential equations. We give sufficient conditions on , and such that the system has at least one positive solution. The existence of positive solution is discussed by using Guo-Krasnosel’skii fixed point theorem. Also, an example which illustrates the obtained result is presented.

Data Availability

No data were used to support this study.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

References

K. Diethelm, The Analysis of Fractional Differential Equations, vol. 2004 of Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Springer, Berlin, Germany, 2010.

R. Hilfer, Applications of Fractional Calculus in Physics, World Scientific, Singapore, 2000.

A. A. Kilbas, H. M. Srivastava, and J. J. Trujillo, Theory and Applications of Fractional Differential Equations, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2006.

K. S. Miller and B. Ross, An Introduction to the Fractional Calculus and Fractional Differential Equations, A Wiley-Interscience Publication, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, USA, 1993.

K. B. Oldham and J. Spanier, The Fractional Calculus, Academic Press, New York, NY, USA, 1974.

I. Podlubny, Fractional Differential Equations, vol. 198 of Mathematics in Science and Engineering, Academic Press, New York, NY, USA, 1999.

N. A. Asif and R. A. Khan, “Positive solutions to singular system with four-point coupled boundary conditions,” Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, vol. 386, no. 2, pp. 848–861, 2012.

J. Henderson and R. Luca, “Positive solutions for a system of semipositone coupled fractional boundary value problems,” Boundary Value Problems, vol. 2016, no. 1, 2016.

J. Henderson and R. Luca, “Positive solutions for a system of fractional differential equations with coupled integral boundary conditions,” Applied Mathematics and Computation, vol. 249, pp. 182–197, 2014.

J. Henderson and R. Luca, “Positive solutions for a system of nonlocal fractional boundary value problems,” Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 985–1008, 2013.

J. Henderson, R. Luca, and A. Tudorache, “On a system of fractional differential equations with coupled integral boundary conditions,” Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 361–386, 2015.

J. Henderson and R. Luca, “Existence and multiplicity of positive solutions for a system of fractional boundary value problems,” Boundary Value Problems, vol. 2014, article 60, 2014.

R. Luca and A. Tudorache, “Positive solutions to a system of semipositone fractional boundary value problems,” Advances in Difference Equations, vol. 2014, no. 1, Article ID 179, 2014.

S. Nageswararao, “Existence and multiplicity for a system of fractional higher-order two-point boundary value problem,” Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation, vol. 53, pp. 93–107, 2016.

S. N. Rao, “Existence of positive solutions for Riemann-Liouville fractional order three-point boundary value problem,” Asian-European Journal of Mathematics, vol. 8, no. 4, Article ID 1550057, 2015.

S. N. Rao, “Multiple positive solutions for a system of Riemann-Liouville fractional order two-point boundary value problems,” Pan-American Mathematical Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 66–81, 2015.

C. Yuan, “Multiple positive solutions for (n-1, 1)-type semipositone conjugate boundary value problems of nonlinear fractional differential equations,” Electronic Journal of Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations, pp. 1–12, 2010.

C. Yuan, D. Jiang, D. O'Regan, and R. P. Agarwal, “Multiple positive solutions to systems of nonlinear semipositone fractional differential equations with coupled boundary conditions,” Electronic Journal of Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations, no. 13, 17 pages, 2012.

R. P. Agarwal, M. Meehan, and D. O'Regan, Fixed Point Theory and Applications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2001.

D. J. Guo and V. Lakshmikantham, Nonlinear Problems in Abstract Cones, vol. 5 of Notes and Reports in Mathematics in Science and Engineering, Academic Press, New York, NY, USA, 1988.