Non-local porous media equations with fractional time derivative

Abstract

In this paper we investigate existence of solutions for the system: Dtαu=div(u∇p),Dtαp=−(−Δ)sp+u2,in T3 for 0<s≤1, and 0<α≤1. The term Dtαu denotes the Caputo derivative, which models memory effects in time. The fractional Laplacian (−Δ)s represents the Lévy diffusion. We prove global existence of nonnegative weak solutions that satisfy a variational inequality. The proof uses several approximations steps, including an implicit Euler time discretization. We show that the proposed discrete Caputo derivative satisfies several important properties, including positivity preserving, convexity and rigorous convergence towards the continuous Caputo derivative. Most importantly, we give strong compactness criteria for piecewise constant functions, in the spirit of Aubin–Lions theorem, based on bounds of the discrete Caputo derivative.