Spreading speed and profiles of solutions to a free boundary problem with Dirichlet boundary conditions

Abstract

We discuss a free boundary problem for a reaction–diffusion equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions on both fixed and free boundaries of a one-dimensional interval. The problem was proposed by Du and Lin (2010) to model the spreading of an invasive or new species by putting Neumann boundary condition on the fixed boundary. Asymptotic properties of spreading solutions for such problems have been investigated in detail by Du and Lou (2015) and Du, Matsuzawa and Zhou (2014). The authors (2011) studied a free boundary problem with Dirichlet boundary condition. In this paper we will derive sharp asymptotic properties of spreading solutions to the free boundary problem in the Dirichlet case under general conditions on f. It will be shown that the spreading speed is asymptotically constant and determined by a semi-wave problem and that the solution converges to a semi-wave near the spreading front as t→∞ provided that the semi-wave problem has a unique solution.