Propagation Speed of Degenerate Diffusion Equations with Time Delay

Abstract

We are concerned with a class of degenerate diffusion equations with time delay describing population dynamics with age structure. In our recent study [Nonlinearity, 33 (2020), 4013–4029], we established the existence and uniqueness of critical traveling wave for the time-delayed degenerate diffusion equations, and obtained the reducing mechanism of time delay on critical wave speed. In this paper, we now are able to show the asymptotic spreading speed and its coincidence with the critical wave speed $$c^*(m,r)$$ of sharp wave, and prove that the initial perturbation or the boundary of the compact support of the solution propagates at the critical wave speed $$c^*(m,r)$$ for the time-delayed degenerate diffusion equations. Remarkably, different from the existing studies related to spreading speeds, the time delay and the degenerate diffusion lead to some essential difficulties in the analysis of the spreading speed, because the time delay makes the critical speed of traveling waves slow down in a more complicated fashion such that the critical speed cannot be determined by the characteristic equation, and the degenerate diffusion causes the loss of regularity for the solutions. By a phase transform technique we construct upper and lower solutions with semi-compact supports and then we determine the asymptotic spreading speed. Furthermore, we propose a brand-new sharp-profile-based difference scheme to handle large variation of degenerate diffusion $$(u^m)_{xx}$$ near the sharp edge and carry out some numerical simulations which perfectly confirm our theoretical results.