1. Introduction
We consider nonlocal integro-differential equations involving Hilfer fractional derivatives and almost sectorial operators:
where
is the Hilfer fractional derivative of order
and type
. We assume that
is an almost sectorial operator on a Banach space
with norm
. Let
,
and
to be given abstract functions to be specified later. For brevity, we take
Over the last decades, mathematical modeling has been supported by the field of fractional calculus, with several successful results and fractional operators shown to be an excellent tool to describe the hereditary properties of various materials and processes. Recently, this combination has gained a large amount of importance, mainly because fractional differential equations have become powerful tools for the modeling of several complex phenomena in numerous seemingly diverse and widespread fields of science and engineering; see, for instance, the basic text books in [
1,
2,
3,
4] and recent research works in [
5,
6,
7]. In fact, abrupt changes, such as shocks, harvesting, or natural disasters, may occur in the dynamics of evolving processes. These short-term perturbations are often treated in the form of impulses. Recently, in many published works, Hilfer fractional differential equations have received attention [
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17].
In [
15], Jaiswal and Bahuguna studied equations of Hilfer fractional derivatives with almost sectorial operators in the abstract sense:
We also refer to the work in [
8], where Ahmed et al. studied the question of the existence of nonlinear Hilfer fractional differential equations with controls. Sufficient conditions are also established, where the time fractional derivative is the Hilfer derivative. In [
18], Zhang and Zhou studied fractional Cauchy problems with almost sectorial operators of the form
where
is the Riemann–Liouville derivative of order
q,
is the Riemann–Liouville integral of order
,
,
A is an almost sectorial operator on a complex Banach space, and
f is a given function. Motivated by these results, here, we extend the previous available results of the literature to a class of Hilfer fractional integro-differential equations in which the closed operator is almost sectorial. Moreover, we also consider both compactness and noncompactness cases of the semigroup operator.
The paper is structured as follows. In
Section 2, we present necessary information about the Hilfer derivative, almost sectorial operators, measures of non-compactness, mild solutions of Equations (
1) and (
2) and some useful definitions, results and lemmas. We discuss fundamental results for mild solutions to Equations (
1) and (
2) in
Section 3. In
Section 4, we prove the solvability question in two cases, when associated semigroups are compact and noncompact, respectively. An example is then given in
Section 5 to illustrate our main results. We end with
Section 6, which presents our conclusions.
2. Preliminaries
In this section, we recall the necessary theory that is used throughout the work in order to obtain new results.
2.1. Fractional Derivatives
We start with a short introduction of the main definitions in fractional calculus [
13,
19].
Definition 1. The left-sided Riemann–Liouville fractional integral of order with a lower limit a for a function is defined asprovided the right hand side is defined almost everywhere (a.e.) on . Remark 1. If , then we write , whereand, as usual, * denotes the convolution of functions. Note that with δ the delta Dirac function. Definition 2. The left-sided Riemann–Liouville fractional derivative of order , , , for a function , is defined byprovided the right hand side is defined a.e. on . Definition 3. The left-sided Caputo’s fractional derivative of order , , , for a function , is defined by provided the right hand side is defined a.e. on .
Definition 4. The left-sided Hilfer fractional derivative of order and type , of a function , is defined as Remark 2. (i) If , and , then the Hilfer fractional derivative corresponds to the classical Riemann–Liouville fractional derivative:(ii) If , and , then the Hilfer fractional derivative corresponds to the classical Caputo fractional derivative: 2.2. Measure of Non-Compactness
The motivation to consider our problem can be found in [
18,
19]. Here, we generalize the results in [
18,
19]. Let
⊂
be bounded. The Hausdorff measure of non-compactness is considered as
while the Kurtawoski measure of noncompactness
on a bounded set
is given by
with the following properties:
gives , where are bounded subsets of ;
if and only if is relatively compact in ;
for all ;
;
;
for .
Let
and
. One defines
Proposition 1. If is equicontinuous and bounded, then is continuous on I. Furthermore, Proposition 2. Let be Bochner integrable functions. This implies that a.e. for and . Then, and satisfies Proposition 3. Let be a bounded set. Then, for any , there exists a sequence such that 2.3. Almost Sectorial Operators
Let and . We define and its closure by , such that with .
Definition 5 (See [
20]).
For and , we define as the family of all closed and linear operators such thatwhere is the resolvent operator and is said to be an almost sectorial operator on .
Proposition 4 (See [
20]).
Let for and . Then the following properties hold: is analytic and ;
;
, where is a constant;
if , then if ;
, with
We use the following Wright-type function [
19]:
For , the following properties hold:
- (A1)
, ;
- (A2)
;
- (A3)
.
The characteristic operators
and
are defined by
and
Theorem 1 (See Theorem 4.6.1 of [
19]).
For each fixed , and are bounded linear operators on . Moreover,where and are constants dependent on α and β. Theorem 2 (See [
19]).
The operators and are continuous in the uniform operator topology for . For , the continuity is uniform on . Define . Our main results are proved in relation to the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1 (H1). For, andare continuous functions and, for each, andare strongly measurable.
Hypothesis 2 (H2). There exist functionssatisfyingfor alland almost all t onand Hypothesis 3 (H3). Functionis completely continuous and there exists a positive constant k such that.
Hypothesis 4 (H4). We assume thatfor,
,
and, where.
For the next two lemmas, we refer to [
9,
12].
Lemma 1 (See [
9,
12]).
The fractional Cauchy problem (1)–(2) is equivalent to the integral equation Lemma 2 (See [
9,
12]).
If u is a solution to the integral Equation (3), then it satisfieswhere with . Definition 6. By a mild solution of the Cauchy problem in Equations (1) and (2), we mean a function that satisfies We define operator
as
Lemma 3 (See [
15]).
The operators and are bounded linear operators on for every fixed . Also, for , we have Proposition 5 (See [
15]).
The operators and are strongly continuous for . 3. Auxiliary Results
Below, we present our original contributions.
Theorem 3. Let for and . Assuming that – are satisfied, then the operator is equicontinuous, provided with .
Proof. For
and
, we have
Now, let
. One has
Using the triangle inequality, we get
From the strong continuity of
, we have
as
. Also,
Then, by using (H2) and the dominated convergence theorem,
as
. Since
and
exists, we obtain
as
. For
, we have
Since is uniformly continuous and , then as , independent of . Hence, , independently of as . Therefore, is equicontinuous. □
Theorem 4. Let , , and . Then, under Hypotheses (H1)–(H4), the operator is continuous and bounded, provided with .
Proof. We verify that
maps
into itself. Taking
and defining
we have
. Let
,
Thus,
for any
. Now, to verify
is continuous in
, let
,
,
with
; that is,
;
and
on
. Then, (H1) implies that
as
. From (H2), we obtain the inequality
that is,
Applying Theorem 1, we have
which tends to 0 as
, i.e.,
pointwise on
. Moreover, Theorem 3 implies that
uniformly on
as
, that is,
is continuous. □
5. Example
As an illustrative example, let us consider the following Hilfer fractional partial differential equation with a nonlocal condition:
where
,
,
, and
,
, are given constants. Let us take the nonlinear function
and the nonlocal function
. Assume that
and define
by
with domain
It follows from the work in [
20] that there exist constants
such that
. It is known that
is the infinitesimal generator of a differentiable semigroup
in
given by
where
and
. This implies
and leads to its compactness property. We can check that all hypotheses (H1)–(H4) are fulfilled; thus, our Theorem 5 can be applied ensuring that problem (
4) admits a mild solution.