On a Moving Boundary Problem Aristing in Fluidized Bed Combustion

We consider a model describing the combustion of a coal particlein a fluidized bed, in which attrition plays a dominant role.The model consists of (1) a quasi-linear elliptic equation forthe oxygen concentration, supplemented by boundary conditionson the moving surface representing the burning particle interface,(2) an evolution equation for the carbon consumption, and (3)an equation governing the motion of the interface in terms ofa specified function of the carbon consumption at the interface.We prove a global existence and uniqueness result, togetherwith a priori bounds for the solution; the existence of travellingwaves will also be established.