Global existence for a class of viscous systems of conservation laws

We prove existence and boundedness of classical solutions for a family of viscous conservation laws in one space dimension for arbitrarily large time. The result relies on H. Amann’s criterion for global existence of solutions and on suitable uniform-in-time estimates for the solution. We also apply Jüngel’s boundedness-by-entropy principle in order to obtain global existence for systems with possibly degenerate diffusion terms. This work is motivated by the study of a physical model for the space-time evolution of the strain and velocity of an anharmonic spring of finite length.