Large-Time Behaviour of Solutions of the Exterior-Domain Cauchy–Dirichlet Problem for the Porous Media Equation with Homogeneous Boundary Data

The title of this paper states precisely what the subject is. The first part of the paper concerns the radially-symmetric problem in the exterior of the unit ball. It is shown that in time the solution of the problem converges to one of two specific self-similar solutions of the porous media equation, dependent upon the dimensionality of the problem. Moreover, the free boundary of the solution converges to that of the self-similar solution. The critical space dimension is two, for which there is no distinction between the self-similar solutions, and the form of the convergence is exceptional. The technique used is a comparison principle involving a variable that is a weighted integral of the solution. The second part of the paper is devoted to the problem in an arbitrary spatial domain with no conditions of symmetry. A special invariance principle and the results obtained for the radially-symmetric case are used to determine the large-time behaviour of solutions and their free boundaries. This behaviour is decidedly different from when the boundary data are fixed and not homogeneous.