LARGE TIME BEHAVIOR OF SOLUTIONS TO SOME DEGENERATE PARABOLIC EQUATIONS

The purpose of this paper is to study the limit in L ¹(Ω), as t → ∞, of solutions of initial-boundary-value problems of the form u_t ? Δw = 0 and u ∈ β(w) in a bounded domain Ω with general boundary conditions ?w/?η + γ(w) ? 0. We prove that a solution stabilizes by converging as t → ∞ to a solution of the associated stationary problem. On the other hand, since in general these solutions are not unique, we characterize the true value of the limit and comment the results on the related concrete situations like the Stefan problem and the filtration equation.