Abstract
A time-fractional substantial diffusion equation of variable order is investigated, in which the variable-order fractional substantial derivative accommodates the memory effects and the structure change of the surroundings of the physical processes with respect to time. The existence and uniqueness of the solutions to the proposed model are proved, based on which the weighted high-order regularity of the solutions, in which the weight function characterizes the singularity of the solutions, are analyzed.
1. Introduction
Fractional problems with substantial derivatives have attracted increasing amounts of attention due to their applications in, e.g., characterizing the functionals of anomalous diffusion and non-Brownian motions [1,2]. There are several investigations in mathematical analysis and numerical methods to such kinds of problems [3,4,5,6,7,8,9], while the corresponding studies for the variable-order fractional substantial derivative models, in which the variable fractional order accommodates, e.g., the structure change of the surroundings with respect to time, are rarely found in the literature.
In some recent works, the following Caputo variable-order time-fractional diffusion equations are investigated mathematically and numerically [10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
Here, the Caputo variable-order fractional derivative operator is defined as [17,18,19]
The Caputo (variable-order) fractional derivative is widely used in various applications that exhibit the power law type memory effects due to the power function integral kernel. The Caputo variable-order fractional substantial derivative operator , which is defined in the following for some and [1,2,3]
tempers the memory effects of the Caputo fractional derivative operator by introducing the exponential factor, such that the impacts located at s are negligible if is large [1,3]. Due to the complicated form of the variable-order fractional substantial derivative, existing analysis techniques for investigating the Caputo variable-order fractional derivative problems may not apply directly for problems involving (1), which motivates the current work.
In this paper, we analyze the following time-fractional diffusion equation [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28] equipped with variable-order fractional substantial derivative
where , , is a d-dimensional domain for with a smooth boundary . In the following two sections, we rigorously prove the well-posedness and high-order regularity of the solutions to problem (2), respectively, which provide a theoretical basis for this model. In particular, a weight function is introduced in the estimate of high-order smoothing properties to characterize the initial singularity of the solutions.
In the rest of the paper, let be the Hilbert space of functions with weak derivatives up to order 1 in , the space of square-integrable functions on . The corresponding norms are defined by
for some Banach space stands for the space of the functions in with respect to the norm of . Q denotes a generic constant that may assume different values at different cases.
2. Existence and Uniqueness
We prove the existence and uniqueness of the solutions to problem (2) in this section. Throughout the paper, we assume that there exists a constant , such that
Theorem 1.
If and , problem (2) has a unique solution and
where Q is independent from the data and the solutions and the norm for is defined in terms of the eigenpairs of by
Proof.
If we expand u in terms of as
then satisfy the following ordinary differential equation
where w, , h and refer to , , and , respectively, for . We consider the fractional term as part of the right-hand side term in (3) to obtain
An application of the variation-of-constants formula yields
where * stands for the convolution on as follows
Then, we differentiate (4) with respect to t, multiply for some on the resulting equation and reformulate as a sum of a linear operator and a function
to obtain an integral equation in terms of as follows
In order to prove the well-posedness of this integral equation in , it suffices to show that the linear operator is a contraction in . For , we apply
and Young’s convolution inequality to bound by
The operator is then accordingly bounded by
We incorporate the above two equations to conclude that for large enough, is a contraction in and, thus, the integral Equation (5) has a unique solution . We further apply this contractability on (5) to obtain a stability estimate
Then, the w defined by
with the estimate
satisfies the differential Equation (3). The unique solution to (3) follows from that of (5).
The estimate of the solutions in follows from
3. Weighted Regularity
We prove the weighted regularity of the solutions to problem (2) in the following theorem.
Theorem 2.
Suppose α has bounded first-order derivatives for each coordinate, , and for some . Then, the following estimate holds
where
and Q is independent from the data and the solutions.
Proof.
We differentiate (4) twice in time to obtain
The could be simplified as
We, therefore, multiply on both sides of (6), apply on the resulting equation, choosing large enough and employ (9) and , as well as similar (and simpler) proofs as above to obtain
We employ this result to obtain the estimate of as
which completes the proof. □
4. Conclusions
In this paper we rigorously prove the well-posedness and high-order regularity of the solutions to the time-fractional diffusion equation equipped with variable-order fractional substantial derivative. In particular, a weight function is introduced in the estimate of high-order smoothing properties to characterize the initial singularity of the solutions. Based on these theoretical estimates, we will carry out numerical analysis for the proposed model in the near future in order to provide supports for practical implementations.
Author Contributions
X.Z.: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Writing—Original Draft Preparation, Funding acquisition; H.W.: Conceptualization, Writing—Review and Editing, Funding acquisition; X.G.: Conceptualization, Writing—Review and Editing, Funding acquisition. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This work was partially funded by the ARO MURI Grant W911NF-15-1-0562, by the National Science Foundation under Grant DMS2012291, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 11901354, 11971272, by the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province for Excellent Youth Scholars ZR2020YQ02, by Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province of China tsqn201909044, by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grants 2021TQ0017 and 2021M700244, and by the International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship Program (Talent-Introduction Program) YJ20210019.
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
Not applicable.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express their most sincere thanks to the referees for their very helpful comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the quality of this paper.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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