Existence and asymptotic behavior of solutions to a nonlinear parabolic equation of fourth order

This paper is devoted to studying the existence and asymptotic behavior of solutions to a nonlinear parabolic equation of fourth order: ut+∇⋅(|∇Δu|^p−2∇Δu)=f(u) in Ω⊂RN with boundary condition u=Δu=0 and initial data u₀. The substantial difficulty is that the general maximum principle does not hold for it. The solutions are obtained for both the steady-state case and the developing case by the fixed point theorem and the semi-discretization method. Unlike the general procedures used in the previous papers on the subject, we introduce two families of approximate solutions with determining the uniform bounds of derivatives with respect to the time and space variables, respectively. By a compactness argument with necessary estimates, we show that the two approximation sequences converge to the same limit, i.e., the solution to be determined. In addition, the decays of solutions towards the constant steady states are established via the entropy method. Finally, it is interesting to observe that the solutions just tend to the initial data u₀ as p→∞.