Abstract and Applied Analysis

Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 420514, 6 pages

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/420514

Research Article

Existence and Exact Asymptotic Behavior of Positive Solutions for a Fractional Boundary Value Problem

Habib Mâagli, Noureddine Mhadhebi, and Noureddine Zeddini

King Abdulaziz University, Rabigh Campus, College of Sciences and Arts, Department of Mathematics, P.O. Box 344, Rabigh 21911, Saudi Arabia

Received 4 November 2012; Accepted 25 December 2012

Academic Editor: Chuanzhi Bai

Copyright © 2013 Habib Mâagli et al. 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 establish the existence and uniqueness of a positive solution for the fractional boundary value problem , with the condition , where , and is a nonnegative continuous function on that may be singular at or .

1. Introduction

Fractional differential equations arise in various fields of science and engineering such as control, porous media, electrochemistry, viscoelasticity, and electromagnetism. They also serve as an excellent tool for the description of hereditary properties of various materials and processes (see[1–3]). In consequence, the subject of fractional differential equations is gaining much importance and attention. Motivated by the surge in the development of this subject, we consider the following problem:

where , , is a nonnegative continuous function on that may be singular at or and is the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative. Then we study the existence and exact asymptotic behavior of positive solutions for this problem.

We recall that for a measurable function , the Riemann-Liouville fractional integral and the Riemann-Liouville derivative of order are, respectively, defined by

provided that the right-hand sides are pointwise defined on . Here and means the integral part of the number and is the Euler Gamma function.

Moreover, we have the following well-known properties (see [2, 4]):

(i) for , , ,(ii) for a.e. , where , ,(iii) if and only if , where and .

Several results are obtained for fractional differential equation with different boundary conditions (see [5–15] and the references therein), but none of them deals with the existence of a positive solution for problem (1).

Our aim in this paper is to establish the existence and uniqueness of a positive solution for problem (1) with a precise asymptotic behavior, where is the set of all functions such that is continuous on . Note that for , the solution for problem (1) blows up at .

To state our result, we need some notations. We will use to denote the set of Karamata functions defined on by

for some , where and such that . It is clear that a function is in if and only if is a positive function in such that

For two nonnegative functions and defined on a set , the notation , , means that there exists such that , for all . We denote also for .

Throughout this paper we assume that is nonnegative on and satisfies the following condition.

   such that

where , , satisfying

In the sequel, we introduce the function defined on by

Our main result is the following.

Theorem 1. Let and assume that satisfies . Then problem (1) has a unique positive solution satisfying for

This paper is organized as follows. Some preliminary lemmas are stated and proved in the next section, involving some already known results on Karamata functions. In Section 3, we give the proof of Theorem 1.

2. Technical Lemmas

To keep the paper self-contained, we begin this section by recapitulating some properties of Karamata regular variation theory. The following is due to [16, 17].

Lemma 2. The following hold.

(i)Let and , then one has

(ii)Let , and . Then one has , , and .

Example 3. Let . Let , and let be a sufficiently large positive real number such that the function

is defined and positive on , for some , where ( times. Then .

Applying Karamata’s theorem (see [16, 17]), we get the following.

Lemma 4. Let and let be a function in defined on . One has the following.

(i)If , then diverges and . (ii)If , then converges and .

Lemma 5. Let be defined on . Then one has

If further converges, then one has

Proof. We distinguish two cases.

Case  1. We suppose that converges. Since the function is nonincreasing in , for some , it follows that, for each , we have

It follows that . So we deduce (11).

Now put

Using that , we obtain

This implies that

So (12) holds.

Case  2. We suppose that diverges. We have, for some ,

This implies that

This proves (11) and completes the proof.

Remark 6. Let defined on ; then, using (4) and (11), we deduce that

If further converges, we have by (11) that

Lemma 7. Given and is such that the function is continuous and integrable on , then the boundary value problem

has a unique solution given by

where

is the Green function for the boundary value problem (21).

Proof. Since is a solution of the equation , then . Consequently there exist two constants , such that . Using the fact that and , we obtain and . So

In the following, we give some estimates on the function . So, we need the following lemma.

Lemma 8. For , and , one has

Proposition 9. On , one has

Proof. For , we have

Since for , then, by applying Lemma 8 with and , we obtain

which completes the proof.

In the sequel we put

where and we aim to give some estimates on .

Proposition 10. Assume that with

Then for ,

Proof. Using Proposition 9, we have

For , we use Lemma 4 and hypotheses (30) to deduce that

Hence, it follows from Lemma 2 and hypothesis (30) that, for , we have

Now, for , we use again Lemma 4 and hypothesis (30) to deduce that

Hence, it follows from Lemmas 2 and 5 that, for , we have

This together with (34) implies that (36) holds on .

3. Proof of Theorem 1

We begin this section by giving a preliminary result that will play a crucial role in the proof of Theorem 1.

Proposition 11. Assume that the function satisfies and put for . Then one has, for ,

Proof. For , we have

So, we can see that

where , and, according to Lemma 2, the functions and are in . Moreover, using Lemma 4, we have and . So the result follows from Proposition 10.

Proof of Theorem 1. From Proposition 11, there exists such that for each

where .

Put and let

In order to use a fixed point theorem, we denote and we define the operator on by

For this choice of , we can easily prove that for , we have and .

Now, we have

Since the function is continuous on and the function is integrable on , we deduce that the operator is compact from to itself. It follows by the Schauder fixed point theorem that there exists such that . Put . Then and satisfies the equation

Since the function is continuous and integrable on , then by Lemma 7 the function is a positive continuous solution of problem (1).

Finally, let us prove that is the unique positive continuous solution satisfying (8). To this aim, we assume that (1) has two positive solutions satisfying (8) and consider the nonempty set and put . Then and we have . It follows that and consequently

Which implies by Lemma 7 that . By symmetry, we obtain also that . Hence and . Since , then and consequently .

Example 12. Let and be a positive continuous function on such that

where and or and . Then, using Theorem 1, problem (1) has a unique positive continuous solution satisfying the following estimates.

(i)If or and , then for ,

(ii)If , then for ,

(iii)If , then for ,

(iv)If , then for ,

(v)If , then for ,

Acknowledgment

The authors thank the anonymous referees for a careful reading of the paper and for their helpful suggestions.

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