1. Introduction and Main Results
Driven by the need to understand the biological transportation networks (for instance, leaf venation in plants, angiogenesis of blood vessels and neural networks which transport electric charge), biologists and physicists have expressed great interest in investigating the qualitative properties of network structures in the last few decades (see for instance [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5] and references therein). Recently, Hu and Cai [
6] introduced a purely local dynamic adaptation model based on mechanical laws on a graph, which was extended to a continuum one in [
7,
8,
9] that was subsequently studied in the series of papers [
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15]. This continuum model, posed in spatial domain Ω, can be read as
The unknown function
denotes a scalar pressure of the fluid transported within the network which satisfies Darcy’s type equation due to Darcy’s law for slow flow in the network being valid, and thus
represents a driving force for the evolution of the vector-valued conductance
that describes the dynamics of networks by using a reaction–diffusion equation consisting of three different mechanisms—pressure effect, diffusion (representing microscopic Brownian process) and an algebraic conductance-relaxation; the given function
models the sources and sinks. Values of the parameters
(diffusion coefficient),
(activation parameter) and
(relaxation exponent) are determined by the particular physical applications. For instance, we get from the known experimental studies (see [
6,
16] and ([
8],
Section 2) for details) that
can be used to describe blood vessel systems in the human body and that
corresponds to leaf venation.
From a mathematical perspective, system (
1) exhibits two rather peculiar nonlinear structures:
in system (
1)
1 and
in (
1)
2, which may result in yielding several difficulties in the mathematical analysis. For instance, the absence of a priori
-bound for
may cause the elliptic coefficients in (
1)
2 to be singular, and thus the solution of (
1)
2 is too weak to control the nonlinear term
in (
1)
1. These challenges make the cross-diffusion system (
1) of interest. We would like to mention that, when system (
1) is posed in a bounded domain
, it should be supplemented with the initial condition
and the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions
The initial-boundary value problems (
1)–(
3) has attracted a lot of interest already—see, for instance, ref. [
10] for the existence of global weak solution and of local mild solution when
that was extended to the case of
in [
11], ref. [
13] for the partial regularity of weak solution, ref. [
14] for the regularity of stationary weak solution in two space dimensions and ref. [
15] for the existence of local classical large-data solution and of global classical small-data solution.
To our best knowledge, the Cauchy problems (
1) and (
2) was only studied in [
17] when
, in which local existence as well as blow-up criterion for large initial data and global existence for small initial data were established based on
being a Hilbert space; however, there is no result on the Cauchy problems (
1) and (
2) on
. Our goal is to fill this gap. It is worthwhile pointing out that the important problem of the mathematical theory concerning the Cauchy problems (
1) and (
2) is whether or not the global in time smooth solution exists for any prescribed smooth initial data. Hence, in the absence of a global well-posedness theory, establishing a priori estimates is of major importance for both theoretical and practical purposes, which motivates us to investigate an a priori blow-up criterion and a priori upper bounds of strong solutions to system (
1) and (
2) with
. We would like remark that, in contrast to system (
1) and (
2) with
,
not being a Hilbert space poses obstacles with adopting the same strategies in [
17] to study the Cauchy problems (
1) and (
2) with
. To overcome this challenge, we will derive the a priori
-bound for
to rule out the degeneracy and develop some new dissipation mechanisms hidden in the system (
1) and (
2) by fully utilizing some essential symmetrical structures of system when
.
Before stating our main results, we need to layout some notations.
and
denote the usual Hilbert space and Lebesgue space with the norms
and
(or
and
for short), respectively. The functions in these spaces are usually understood to be real valued. If no confusion is likely, we shall use the same notation for similar spaces of vector-valued functions and of matrix-valued functions, for instance,
Throughout this paper, we will use to denote for some uniform constant . Unless specified, the values of the constants may vary line by line according to the context.
With the aforementioned notations, we now state our first result as follows.
Theorem 1. Let , and , , where . Assume that there exist a time and a strong solution to systems (
1) and (
2)
on satisfying Then, there exists a maximal time such that is a strong solution of the Cauchy problem (
1) and (
2)
on . Moreover, if , it holds thatif and only iffor any , where Remark 1. The blow-up criterion (
4)
in Theorem 1 is similar to the blow-up criterion of the strong solution of the Cauchy problem (
1) and (
2)
on [17] and to the Serrin-type criterion of Leray–Hopf weak solution of the Navier–Stokes equations [18]. Invoking the blow-up criterion (
4) obtained in Theorem 1, we can further present that the local strong solution of the Cauchy problem (
1) and (
2) can be extended to a global one.
Theorem 2. Assume that all conditions in Theorem 1 hold. Then, there exists a positive constant (see (
32)
below) such that, if , then the local strong solution of the Cauchy problem (
1) and (
2)
with is global indeed in the sense thatfor all and for some positive constants k and C being independent of t. Remark 2. As far as we are concerned, even though there are substantial results regarding the system (
1)
on or a bounded domain , there are not yet any on . Theorem 1 and Theorem 2 seem to be the first rigorous theoretical analysis on the initial-value problem (
1) and (
2)
on and are a first step toward filling this gap. Remark 3. Compared to the initial-value problem (
1) and (
2)
on in [17], establishing an a priori blow-up criterion (
4)
and a priori upper bounds (
5)
are nontrivial in the sense that the benefit emanating from being a Hilbert space will be not granted and that our strategy depends on the weight Hardy inequality over (see (
12)
) as well as seeking some new estimates. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, an a priori blow-up criterion is established. In
Section 3, invoking this a priori blow-up criterion, we present that the local strong solution of the Cauchy problem (
1) and (
2) is global indeed in the two-dimensional setting.
2. Blow-Up Criterion. Proof of Theorem 1
Assume that there exist a time
and a unique strong solution
to systems (
1) and (
2) on
such that
Clearly, by employing a standard bootstrap argument, we can extend this strong solution
to the maximal interval of existence
, where either
or
. If
, then we have
and vice versa. The goal of this section is to further establish a more precise blow-up criterion for such strong solution, which allows us to extend the local strong solution to a global one in the next section. To this end, for any
we abbreviate
for simplicity. We now begin with establishing the following a priori estimates to the strong solution of systems (
1) and (
2) on
.
Lemma 1. Let be a solution to system (
1) and (
2)
in . We havefor any , where and the positive constant C depend only on D, c and γ. Proof. Without loss of generality, we may assume that is sufficiently smooth. The general case can be dealt with by taking an approximation procedure.
We proceed along the lines of the proof of ([
17], Lemma 3.1) and have
For any
, by integrating (
9) from 0 to
t, we infer that
where the function
solves the following Poisson equation
To estimate the terms related to
on the right-hand side of (
10), by using
as a test function in (
11), we obtain from the integration by parts that
Recalling the Hardy inequality over
([
19])
and employing Hölder’s inequality, we arrive at
From this, we conclude that
This together with (
10) yields that
where we used Sobolev’s embedding
, Young’s inequality and the fact
in the last inequality.
Next, taking the
inner product of
with
and using the integration by parts, we can obtain
Taking the
inner product of
with
p, we can obtain from the integration by parts that
Similarly, we conclude from Hölder’s inequality, Sobolev’s inequality and Hardy’s inequality (
12) that
which together with (
13) yields that
For any
, we integrate the above inequality from 0 to
t and thus obtain
This completes the proof of Lemma 1. □
To obtain the higher-order estimates of the solution component , we should establish the higher-order estimates of the solution component p.
Lemma 2. Let be a solution to systems (
1) and (
2)
in . Then, there exists a positive constant C depending only on , and γ such thatfor any and all . Proof. We begin with establishing the estimate (
16). Differentiating
with respect to
for
, we have
By taking the
inner product of (
18) with
, we obtain from the integration by parts that
Invoking Hölder’s inequality and Hardy’s inequality (
12), the third term on the right-hand side of (
19) can be controlled as follows:
Based on this, we get from Hölder’s inequality and Young’s inequality that
From this, one arrives at
which implies that
Note that, for any
, Hölder’s inequality, Sobolev’s embedding, Young’s inequality and Lemma 1 yield that
and similarly that
Hence, we can conclude from (
20) that, for any
,
This indicates that (
16) holds.
We now turn to the higher-order estimate (
17). To achieve this, differentiating (
18) with respect to
for
, we obtain
Then, multiplying (
22) by
and using the integration by parts, we have
We now use Hölder’s inequality and Hardy’s inequality (
12) to estimate the rightmost term of the above equation as follows:
By employing Young’s inequality, we can deduce that
and thus that
We estimate the terms on the right-hand side of (
23) one by one. Firstly, we conclude from Hölder’s inequality, Sobolev’s embedding, the interpolation, Young’s inequality and Lemma 1 that
Secondly, we get from a similar procedure that, for any
,
Similarly, we have
for any
. It follows from inserting the above estimates into (
23) that
for any
. This implies (
17) and thus completes the proof of Lemma 2. □
With the improved a priori estimates on p at hand, we can directly derive the higher-order estimates of the solution component under the same assumptions as above.
Lemma 3. Let be a solution to systems (
1) and (
2)
in . Then, there exists a positive constant C depending only on D, c and γ such that for all ,for , andfor . Proof. Similar to ([
17], Lemma 3.3), we get that there exists a positive constant
independent of
t such that
We estimate the terms on the right-hand side of (
24) one by one. For the first term on the right-hand side of (
24), we obtain from Hölder’s inequality, the interpolation inequality, Young’s inequality and Lemma 1 that
which together with Lemma 2 yields that
To estimate the second term on the right-hand side of (
24), by using the Leibniz’s product rule and Hölder’s inequality, we obtain
For
, a straightforward application of the interpolation inequality yields that
and thus that
On the other hand, for
, we have from Hölder’s inequality and the interpolation inequality that
for any
and thus
Substituting (
25), (
26) and (
27) into (
24), we deduce from Lemma 1 that, for
,
and that, for
,
This completes the proof of Lemma 3. □
Invoking Lemmas 1–3, we now establish a more precise blow-up criterion for the strong solution as follows.
Lemma 4. Let be a solution to systems (
1) and (
2)
in and be the maximal existence time. If , it holds thatif and only iffor any , where Proof. We can first deduce from Lemma 3 that, for
and all
,
and that for
and all
,
Hence, Gronwall’s inequality implies that, for
,
and that, for
,
By employing Lemma 1 again, we conclude that
if and only if
for
, and
for
, where
. This completes the proof of Lemma 4. □
Based on Lemma 4, we now prove Theorem 1.
Proof of Theorem 1. The blow-up criterion is a by-product of Lemma 4. Thus, we have completed the proof of Theorem 1. □