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February
7, 2001 Abstract |
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Free Boundary Problems are very useful modeling tools for many phenomena of practical relevance. They usually consists of some (initial) boundary value problem in a region which is itself an unknown in the problem. In this talk we shall concentrate on FBPs for which the unknown domain undergoes an initial topological change. We shall illustrate the interesting questions for this type of degenerate FBPs by means of two examples: Diffusion in polymers and solidification processes. We then consider a specific model to present our approach to resolving the main issues which include well-posedness and small time asymptotics. |