Journal of Applied Mathematics

Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 262139, 12 pages

doi:10.1155/2012/262139

Research Article

Existence of Solutions of Nonlinear Mixed Two-Point Boundary Value Problems for Third-Order Nonlinear Differential Equation

Yongxin Gao and Fengqin Wang

College of Science, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin 300300, China

Received 17 February 2012; Revised 18 June 2012; Accepted 2 July 2012

Academic Editor: Mehmet Sezer

Copyright © 2012 Yongxin Gao and Fengqin 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.

The authors use the upper and lower solution method to study the existence of solutions of nonlinear mixed two-point boundary value problems for third-order nonlinear differential equation. Some new existence results are obtained by developing the upper and lower solution method. Some applications are also presented.

1. Introduction

It is well known that the upper and lower solution method is a powerful tool for proving existence results for boundary value problems. The upper and lower solution method has been used to deal with the multipoint boundary value problems for second-order ordinary differential equations [1–4] and for higher-order ordinary differential equations [5–11]. There are fewer results on nonlinear mixed two-point boundary value problems for higher-order equations in the literature of ordinary differential equations. For this reason, we consider the third-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation:

together with the nonlinear mixed two-point boundary conditions

where the functions , , and are continuous and monotonic, is a homeomorphic mapping.

We will develop the upper and lower solution method for the boundary value problem

and establish some new existence results. Furthermore, some applications are also presented.

2. Preliminaries

In this section, we will give some preliminary considerations and some lemmas which are essential to our main results.

Definition 2.1. Suppose the functions and satisfy

Then and are, respectively, called the lower and upper solutions of the BVP (1.3).

Because of Definition 2.1, it is clear that . Let .

Definition 2.2. Let denote the class of continuous functions from into , and let and be lower and upper solutions of BVP (1.3). Suppose that there is a function such that

for every , where

with

Then we say that satisfies Nagumo’s condition on the set relative to .

We assume throughout this paper the following.

There are lower and upper solutions and of BVP (1.3) as Definition 2.1. Function satisfies Nagumo’s condition on the set relative to . Function is nonincreasing in . is a homeomorphism with

Function is continuous on and nondecreasing in and satisfies

Function is continuous on and nondecreasing in and nonincreasing in , and it satisfies

It is not difficult to obtain the following lemma.

Lemma 2.3. The boundary value problem

has a Green function

with

It is easy to prove the following lemma similarly to [12, page 25, Theorem ].

Lemma 2.4. Assume that hold. Then for any solution of with on , there exists a constant depending only on , such that

and one calls is Nagumo’s constant.

Lemma 2.5. Assume that hold. Then for any constant , the boundary value problem

at least has a solution , with

on .

Proof. By Lemma 2.3, it is clear that BVP (2.12) is equivalent to integral equation

where is a polynomial satisfying .

Denote

where is Nagumo’s constant.

Assume

Then is bounded and continuous on . Suppose ; , .

Now, define an operator on the set by

If , the norm is defined by

It is clear that

This shows that maps the closed, bounded, and convex set

into itself. Also, is continuous and is bounded. All of these considerations imply that is completely continuous by Ascoli’s theorem. Schauder’ fixed point theorem then yields the fixed point of on . In other words, the following boundary value problem

has a solution , and satisfying and , we have , .

In the following we prove that

In fact, if it is invalid, there is no harm in setting the right inequality to be not true (the case that the left inequality is not true can be proved in the same way). By the assumption, if , for some , then there is a such that

Now, let

They imply that and

We have

which contradicts (2.24); hence, (2.22) is true.

Further, by the definition of is a solution of the boundary value problem

Because there is a , such that

so has a maximal subinterval with interior point , for any , . Hence, for , is the solution of BVP (2.12). And by Lemma 2.4, we have ; this contracts that is the maximal subinterval, so we know . Consequently, is a solution of BVP (2.12).

3. Main Results

Theorem 3.1. Assume hold, then BVP

has a solution , satisfying

on .

Proof. By Lemma 2.5, we know that the boundary value problem

has a solution , with

on . For any .

For fixed , if , then . By , we know

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

Define the following sets:

Obviously, is nonempty. If the theorem is not true, we know that and are all nonempty, and . we claim that is closed. To see this, let , with . Consider the following boundary value problem:

By Lemma 2.5, it is known that, for every , BVP (3.8) has a solution , satisfying

and, by Lemma 2.4, we know .

Clearly, sequences , , are uniformly bounded and equicontinuous on . Consequently, there exists a subsequence of which converges uniformly on , to a solution of the BVP:

with

By assumption, equality cannot occur, so that

and thus . Consequently, is closed. Likewise, we may show is closed. This is a contradiction and proves the theorem.

Similar to the proof of Theorem 3.1, we can obtain the following theorem.

Theorem 3.2. Assume hold, then BVP

has a solution , satisfying

on .

4. Applications

We all know it is difficult to find a solution of some nonlinear ordinary differential equation. But according to Theorem 3.2, we can know whether a boundary value problem, especially a nonlinear boundary value problem, has a solution and we also can know the existence regions of the solution and its derivative.

Example 4.1. Consider the following linear boundary value problem

It is easy to know that are lower and upper solutions of the linear boundary value problem, respectively, where

and all assumptions of Theorem 3.2 hold. So the linear boundary value problem has a solution satisfying

Obviously, the trivial solution of the linear boundary value problem is one.

Example 4.2. Consider nonlinear boundary value problem

It is easy to verify that are lower and upper solutions of the nonlinear boundary value problem, respectively, where

and all assumptions of Theorem 3.2 hold, so the BVP has a solution satisfying

5. Conclusion

In this paper, we study a nonlinear mixed two-point boundary value problem for a third-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation. Some new existence results are obtained by developing the upper and lower solution method. Furthermore, some applications are also presented.

Acknowledgments

The work is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no. ZXH2012 K004) and Civil Aviation University of China Research Funds (no. 2012KYM05). The authors would like to thank the referees for their valuable comments.

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