Abstract
In this paper, the author puts forward a kind of anti-periodic boundary value problems of fractional equations with the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative. More precisely, the author is concerned with the following fractional equation:
with the anti-periodic boundary value conditions
where denotes the standard Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative of order , and the nonlinear function may be singular at . By applying the contraction mapping principle and the other fixed point theorem, the author obtains the existence and uniqueness of solutions.
MSC:34A08, 34B15.
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1 Introduction
In the present paper, we are concerned with the existence of solutions for the fractional differential equation
with anti-periodic boundary value conditions
where denotes the standard Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative of order , and the nonlinear function may be singular at .
Differential equations with fractional order are a generalization of ordinary differential equations to non-integer order. This generalization is not a mere mathematical curiosity but rather has interesting applications in many areas of science and engineering such as electrochemistry, control, porous media, electromagnetism, etc. (see [1–4]). There has been a significant development in the study of fractional differential equations in recent years; see, for example, [5–21].
Anti-periodic boundary value problems occur in mathematic modeling of a variety of physical processes and have recently received considerable attention. For examples and details of anti-periodic fractional boundary value problems, see [22–31] and the references therein. However, up to now, almost all studies on anti-periodic fractional boundary value problems have been devoted to fractional equations with the Caputo fractional derivative. Recently, there appeared a paper dealing with anti-periodic boundary value problems of a fractional equation with the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative (see [22]), which will be formulated later. The main reason is that in general the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative () does not exist unless , and therefore there is some difficulty in expressing anti-periodic boundary value conditions with the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative. So, no matter which kind of anti-periodic boundary value conditions we shall propose, first of all, we must ensure that the limits exist taken on the left-hand side of the formula on the anti-periodic boundary value conditions when variable tends to zero. In the paper [22] mentioned above, Ahmad and Nieto put forward a kind of boundary value problems as follows:
It is well known that the limits and exist. Moreover, it can be verified that , . Especially, comparing with the recent article (see [32]) dealing with the following periodic boundary value problems with Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative
and taking into account the consistency with integer order anti-periodic boundary value problems, we consider the anti-periodic boundary value condition (1.2) in the present paper to be more natural and suitable. It is noteworthy that such a form of anti-periodic boundary value conditions (1.2) is very convenient to construct an appropriate Banach space which coordinates the feature of the solution u because of the fact that () may occur and function may be singular at . Moreover, when in (1.2), the anti-periodic boundary value conditions in (1.2) are changed into , , which are coincident with anti-periodic boundary value conditions of second-order differential equations (see [33]).
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present some necessary definitions and preliminary results that will be used to prove our main results. In Section 3, we put forward and prove our main results. By applying the contraction mapping principle and the other fixed point theorem, we obtain the existence and uniqueness of solutions for boundary value problems (simply denoted by BVP). Finally, we give two examples to demonstrate our main results.
2 Preliminaries
In this section, we introduce some preliminary facts which are used throughout this paper.
Let ℕ be the set of positive integers, ℝ be the set of real numbers.
Definition 2.1 ([3])
The Riemann-Liouville fractional integral of order of a function is given by
Definition 2.2 ([3])
The Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative of order of a function is given by
where , denotes the integer part of α.
Lemma 2.1 ([34])
Let . If with a fractional derivative of order α that belongs to , then
for some , , where .
Let
It is easy to verify that is a normed linear space with the norm
and is a normed linear space with the norm
respectively. Moreover, we have the following lemma.
Lemma 2.2 is a Banach space with the norm .
Proof In fact, let be any sequence in with . Then, for arbitrary , there exists such that
when . So,
when .
In view of (2.2), there exists such that uniformly on , and so
Set . Then , and . So, letting in (2.2), we have
when . That is, uniformly on . Because exists for all , by applying the theorem to the limit convergence of function sequences, we know that , and
So, exists.
Similarly, applying the theorem to the differentiability of function sequences and letting in (2.3), we obtain
whenever .
Let and . Then (2.4) means that uniformly on , and so
by applying the theorem to the limit convergence of function sequences again. That is,
Thus, exists.
To summarize, with . □
Now, we consider the following auxiliary boundary value problem:
where .
We have the following lemma.
Lemma 2.3 For a given , if is a solution of BVP (2.5), then u is given by
where
Proof In fact, owing to the fact that , in view of Lemma 2.1, we have
for some .
So,
and
Because , , we have
Thus,
Similarly, we have
From (2.13)-(2.14), it follows that
and
So, by the boundary value conditions in (2.5) together with (2.10)-(2.11), from (2.15)-(2.17) it follows that
Thus, (2.18)-(2.19) imply that
Substituting (2.20)-(2.21) into (2.9), we have
where , are given by (2.7) and (2.8), respectively.
The proof is complete. □
We definite an operator T on as follows:
for .
We first establish the following lemma.
Lemma 2.4 .
Proof For any , from (2.12), we have that
Again,
Thus, from (2.7)-(2.8), we know that the integrals and converge. So, from (2.12) and (2.22), it follows that exists on . That is, the operator T is well defined.
In what follows, we show that .
From , we know that and . Let , . Then and , , and so and by setting , .
Since
and , , we know that is continuous on from (2.23) and applying the Lebesgue convergence theorem. Consequently, according to
by (2.22).
Finally, in view of (2.22), we have
and
Again,
Hence, formula (2.25) together with (2.13) implies that exists, and formula (2.26) together with (2.13)-(2.27) implies that exists.
Summing up the above analysis, we obtain that . The proof is complete. □
We need the following lemma, which is important in establishing our main result in the next section.
Lemma 2.5 is completely continuous.
Proof We divide the proof into two parts.
Part 1. First, we show that T is a continuous operator.
Let be an arbitrary sequence in with . Then
Thus, from (2.25), it follows that
noting that
and
So,
Similarly, from (2.26), (2.28) and (2.29), we have
noting that
So,
From (2.30)-(2.31), we have that
where
So, T is a continuous operator on .
Part 2. Now we show that T is a compact operator.
Assume that Ω is an arbitrary bounded set in . Then there exists such that for all . By an argument similar to (2.30) and (2.32) in Part 1, from (2.25)-(2.26), we can obtain
and so , where D is as in (2.33). It means that T Ω is bounded.
Now, we show that the set of functions B is equicontinuous on , where .
In fact, for any with and , from (2.25), we have
Again,
and
Thus, from (2.34), it follows that
Again,
because
and , .
Substituting (2.36)-(2.37) into (2.35), we have
The above inequality shows that the set is equicontinuous on .
Finally, we show that the set is also equicontinuous on , where
As before, for any with and , in view of (2.26), we have
noting that , , and
keeping in mind that .
For an arbitrary , take . We can assume that ε is small enough that . Since is uniformly continuous on , there exists such that
when , .
Moreover, because
and
we obtain
when , .
-
(1)
If and with , then
(2.40)
and
because .
Consequently, by (2.40)-(2.41) we have
when with .
-
(2)
If , then
(2.43)
and
Hence, (2.43)-(2.44) imply that
Because , there exists such that
when .
Take , then from (2.46), it follows that
when , noting that because .
So, from (2.45) together with (2.47), it follows that
when and .
Now, take . Then, when , by (2.38), (2.39), (2.42) and (2.48), we have
The above inequality (2.49) shows that the set is equicontinuous on . As a consequence of the Arzela-Ascoli theorem, we have that T Ω is a compact set in . The proof is complete. □
Finally, for the remainder of this section, we give the following lemma, which will be used to obtain our main results.
Lemma 2.6 ([35])
Let E be a Banach space. Assume that Ω is an open bounded subset of E with , and let be a completely continuous operator such that
Then A has a fixed point in Ω.
3 Main results
Let us introduce some assumptions which will be used throughout this paper.
(H1) .
(H2) .
(H3) There exist two constants , such that
for all , , and .
(H4) There exist a function and constants , , such that
for all , , and .
We define two operators F, T on as follows:
where T is defined as before.
We first establish the following lemma to obtain our results.
Lemma 3.1 Suppose that (H1), (H2), (H3) hold. Then the operator A maps into .
Proof For any , by (H3) , we have
So,
Again,
and so
Hence, by (3.1)-(3.3), we have
and so
Again, from (H2) and by letting , we have
and so . Thus, according to hypothesis (H1) and (3.4)-(3.5), we know that and . That is, . Therefore, in view of Lemma 2.5, it follows that . Thus, . The proof is complete. □
The following lemma is significant to obtaining the result in this article.
Lemma 3.2 Suppose that (H1) and (H4) hold. Then the operator is completely continuous.
Proof We first show that the operator F maps into under (H4).
In fact, for any , by an argument similar to (3.4)-(3.5), from (H4) combined with (3.2)-(3.3), it follows that
and so
noting that and .
Thus, according to hypothesis (H1), formulae (3.6)-(3.7) ensure that , noting that .
Now, we prove that the operator is completely continuous.
First of all, in view of Lemma 2.5, we know that the operator because of the fact that and .
It remains to show that the operator A is completely continuous. The following proof is divided into two steps.
Step 1. We show that the operator A is compact on .
In fact, assuming that Ω is an arbitrary set in , there exists such that for all . Thus, from (3.7), it follows that
Therefore, the set is bounded in , and therefore, TB is a compact set in view of Lemma 2.5. That is, A Ω is a compact set, owing to the fact that and . Hence, A is a compact operator.
Step 2. We show that the operator A is continuous on .
Let be an arbitrary sequence in with . Then there exists such that , . Thus, from (3.7), it follows that
for .
The following proof is divided into two parts.
Part 1. By (2.25), we have
By (2.28)-(2.29), we get
So, for any , by the absolute continuity of Lebesgue integral, there exists such that
and therefore,
holds for , because , , , observing (3.8).
On the other hand, for all , formulae (3.2)-(3.3) imply that
and
Since is uniformly continuous on , from (H1), for ε given as before, there exists such that
when , noting that (3.11)-(3.12), where .
Thus, when , formula (3.13) implies that
holds for .
Substituting (3.10) and (3.14) into (3.9), we have that
when , and so
when .
Part 2. By (2.26), we have
because of the fact that and .
For ε given as before, take , where N is given by (3.8).
-
(i)
If , then from (3.8) it follows that
(3.17) -
(ii)
If , then
(3.18)
Again,
By an argument similar to (3.13), we can know that there exists such that
when , where .
Thus, from (3.20), for , it follows that
when .
By (3.18) together with (3.19) and (3.21), we have
when .
On the other hand, from the proof in Part 1 (see the deducing on (3.10) and (3.14)), there exists such that the inequality
holds when .
Define . From (3.16) together with (3.17), (3.22) and (3.23), we have
when , and so
when .
Formulae (3.15), (3.24) yield that in . That is, the operator A is continuous on . The proof is complete. □
In view of Lemma 2.3, it is easy to know that is a solution of BVP (1.1)-(1.2) if and only if is a fixed point of the operator A. Therefore, we can focus on seeking the existence of a fixed point of A in .
Let , where , is given by (H3).
We are now in a position to state the first theorem in the present paper.
Theorem 3.1 Suppose that (H1)-(H3) hold. If , then BVP (1.1)-(1.2) has a unique solution.
Proof According to (H1)-(H2), we know that by Lemma 3.1. By an argument similar to (2.30), for any , in view of (H3) together with (2.25), (2.28) and (2.29), we have
because
by (3.2)-(3.3).
Thus,
Similarly, from (2.26) together with (2.28), (2.31), we have
where .
From the fact that , by (3.25) and (3.26), we immediately have that
As , A is a contraction mapping. So, by the contraction mapping principle, A has a unique fixed point . That is, is the unique solution of BVP (1.1)-(1.2). □
We give another result in this paper as follows.
Theorem 3.2 If (H1), (H4) hold, then BVP (1.1)-(1.2) has at least one solution.
Proof First, by Lemma 3.2, we know that is completely continuous.
Let , , , , , and . Put , .
Take , and set . Now, we prove that
In fact, for any , by (H4) and (2.25) together with (3.7), we have
because
noting that (2.28), (2.29) and keeping in mind the choice of R and .
Thus,
Similarly, by (H4) and (2.26) together with (3.7), we have
noting that (2.28), (2.29), (2.31) and the choice of R as well as .
Thus,
Summing up (3.28) and (3.29), we have that . That is, because . So, the relation (3.27) holds. As a consequence of Lemma 2.6, the operator A has at least one point . That is, is a solution of BVP (1.1)-(1.2). □
Example 3.1 Consider the following anti-periodic boundary value problem:
where , and . Clearly, the function satisfies , and . Further, , , and . As a consequence of Theorem 3.1, BVP (3.30) has a unique solution.
Example 3.2 Consider the following anti-periodic boundary value problem:
where , . Clearly, the function satisfies , where , So, all the assumptions of Theorem 3.2 are satisfied. Hence BVP (3.16) has at least one solution.
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Acknowledgements
The author sincerely thanks the anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and comments which have greatly helped improve this article. Supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Provincial Education Department (D20102502).
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Chai, G. Anti-periodic boundary value problems of fractional differential equations with the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative. Adv Differ Equ 2013, 306 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-1847-2013-306
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-1847-2013-306