Solvability via viscosity solutions for a model of phase transitions driven by configurational forces

This article is concerned with an initial-boundary value problem for an elliptic-parabolic coupled system arising in martensitic phase transition theory of elastically deformable solid materials, e.g., steel. This model was proposed in Alber and Zhu (2007) [4], and investigated in Alber and Zhu (2006) [3] the existence of weak solutions which are defined in a standard way, however the key technique used in Alber and Zhu (2006) [3] is not applicable to multi-dimensional problem. One of the motivations of this study is to solve this multi-dimensional problem, and another is to investigate the sharp interface limits. Thus we define weak solutions in a way, which is different from Alber and Zhu (2006) [3], by using the notion of viscosity solution. We do prove successfully the existence of weak solutions in this sense for one-dimensional problem, yet the multi-dimensional problem is still open. © 2011 Elsevier Inc