The weighted energy-dissipation principle and evolutionary Γ-convergence for doubly nonlinear problems

Liero, Matthias; Melchionna, Stefano

ESAIM: Control, Optimisation and Calculus of Variations, Tome 25 (2019), article no. 36.

Suite au passage du modèle économique de la revue en S20, le texte intégral des articles des années 2019 et 2020 est accessible uniquement sur le site de l'éditeur et est réservé aux abonnés.

We consider a family of doubly nonlinear evolution equations that is given by families of convex dissipation potentials, nonconvex energy functionals, and external forces parametrized by a small parameter ε. For each of these problems, we introduce the so-called weighted energy-dissipation (WED) functional, whose minimizers correspond to solutions of an elliptic-in-time regularization of the target problems with regularization parameter δ. We investigate the relation between the Γ-convergence of the WED functionals and evolutionary Γ-convergence of the associated systems. More precisely, we deal with the limits δ → 0, ε → 0, as well as δ + ε → 0 either in the sense of Γ-convergence of functionals or in the sense of evolutionary Γ-convergence of functional-driven evolution problems, or both. Additionally, we provide some quantitative estimates on the rate of convergence for the limit ε → 0, in the case of quadratic dissipation potentials and uniformly λ-convex energy functionals. Finally, we discuss a homogenization and a dimension reduction problem as examples of application.

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