Generalized solutions in PDEs and the Burgers' equation

In many situations, the notion of function is not sufficient and it needs to be extended. A classical way to do this is to introduce the notion of weak solution; another approach is to use generalized functions. Ultrafunctions are a particular class of generalized functions that has been previously introduced and used to define generalized solutions of stationary problems in [4,7,9,11,12]. In this paper we generalize this notion in order to study also evolution problems. In particular, we introduce the notion of Generalized Ultrafunction Solution (GUS) for a large family of PDEs, and we confront it with classical strong and weak solutions. Moreover, we prove an existence and uniqueness result of GUS's for a large family of PDEs, including the nonlinear Schroedinger equation and the nonlinear wave equation. Finally, we study in detail GUS's of Burgers' equation, proving that (in a precise sense) the GUS's of this equation provide a description of the phenomenon at microscopic level. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.