Viscosity solutions of a class of degenerate quasilinear parabolic equations with Dirichlet boundary condition

This paper is concerned with viscosity solutions for a class of degenerate quasilinear parabolic equations in a bounded domain with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition. The equation under consideration arises from a number of practical model problems including reaction-diffusion processes in a porous medium. The degeneracy of the problem appears on the boundary and possibly in the interior of the domain. The goal of this paper is to establish some comparison properties between viscosity upper and lower solutions and to show the existence of a continuous viscosity solution between them. An application of the above results is given to a porous-medium type of reaction-diffusion model which demonstrates some distinctive properties of the solution when compared with the corresponding semilinear problem. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.