Abstract
We study the existence and multiplicity of positive solutions for a system of nonlinear Riemann-Liouville fractional differential equations, subject to integral boundary conditions. The nonsingular and singular cases for the nonlinearities are investigated.
MSC:34A08, 45G15.
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1 Introduction
We consider the system of nonlinear ordinary fractional differential equations
with the integral boundary conditions
where , , and denote the Riemann-Liouville derivatives of orders α and β, respectively, and the integrals from (BC) are Riemann-Stieltjes integrals.
Under sufficient conditions on functions f and g, which can be nonsingular or singular in the points and/or , we study the existence and multiplicity of positive solutions of problem (S)-(BC). We use the Guo-Krasnosel’skii fixed point theorem (see [1]) and some theorems from the fixed point index theory (from [2] and [3]). By a positive solution of problem (S)-(BC) we mean a pair of functions satisfying (S) and (BC) with , for all and , . The system (S) with , and the boundary conditions (BC) where H and K are scale functions (that is, multi-point boundary conditions) has been investigated in [4] (the nonsingular case) and [5] (the singular case). In [6], the authors give sufficient conditions for λ, μ, f, and g such that the system
with the boundary conditions (BC) with H and K scale functions, has positive solutions (, for all , and ).
Fractional differential equations describe many phenomena in various fields of engineering and scientific disciplines such as physics, biophysics, chemistry, biology, economics, control theory, signal and image processing, aerodynamics, viscoelasticity, electromagnetics, and so on (see [7–13]).
In Section 2, we present the necessary definitions and properties from the fractional calculus theory and some auxiliary results dealing with a nonlocal boundary value problem for fractional differential equations. In Section 3, we give some existence and multiplicity results for positive solutions with respect to a cone for our problem (S)-(BC), where f and g are nonsingular functions. The case when f and g are singular at and/or is studied in Section 4. Finally, in Section 5, we present two examples which illustrate our main results.
2 Preliminaries and auxiliary results
We present here the definitions, some lemmas from the theory of fractional calculus and some auxiliary results that will be used to prove our main theorems.
Definition 2.1 The (left-sided) fractional integral of order of a function is given by
provided the right-hand side is pointwise defined on , where is the Euler gamma function defined by , .
Definition 2.2 The Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative of order for a function is given by
where , provided that the right-hand side is pointwise defined on .
The notation stands for the largest integer not greater than α. We also denote the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative of f by . If then for , and if then for .
Lemma 2.1 ([10])
Let and for and for ; that is, n is the smallest integer greater than or equal to α. Then the solutions of the fractional differential equation , , are
where are arbitrary real constants.
Let , n be the smallest integer greater than or equal to α () and . The solutions of the fractional equation , , are
where are arbitrary real constants.
We consider now the fractional differential equation
with the integral boundary conditions
where , , and is a function of the bounded variation.
Lemma 2.3 If is a function of bounded variation, and , then the solution of problem (1)-(2) is given by
Proof By Lemma 2.2, the solutions of equation (1) are
where . By using the conditions , we obtain . Then we conclude
Now, by condition , we deduce
or
So, we obtain
Therefore, we get the expression (3) for the solution of problem (1)-(2). □
Lemma 2.4 Under the assumptions of Lemma 2.3, the Green’s function for the boundary value problem (1)-(2) is given by
where
Proof By Lemma 2.3 and relation (3), we conclude
where and are given in (5) and (4), respectively. Hence for all . □
Lemma 2.5 ([6])
The function given by (5) has the properties:
-
(a)
is a continuous function and for all .
-
(b)
, for all .
-
(c)
For any ,
where , if (), and
if , .
Lemma 2.6 If is a nondecreasing function and , then the Green’s function of the problem (1)-(2) is continuous on and satisfies for all . Moreover, if satisfies for all , then the unique solution u of problem (1)-(2) satisfies for all .
Proof By using the assumptions of this lemma, we have for all , and so for all . □
Lemma 2.7 Assume that is a nondecreasing function and . Then the Green’s function of the problem (1)-(2) satisfies the inequalities:
-
(a)
, , where
-
(b)
For every , we have
Proof The first inequality (a) is evident. For part (b), for and , , we deduce
Therefore, we obtain the inequalities (b) of this lemma. □
Lemma 2.8 Assume that is a nondecreasing function and , , and , for all . Then the solution , of problem (1)-(2) satisfies the inequality .
Proof For , , , we have
Then we deduce the conclusion of this lemma. □
We can also formulate similar results as Lemmas 2.3-2.8 above for the fractional differential equation
with the integral boundary conditions
where , , is a nondecreasing function and . We denote by , , , , , and the corresponding constants and functions for the problem (6)-(7) defined in a similar manner as , , , , , and , respectively.
3 The nonsingular case
In this section, we investigate the existence and multiplicity of positive solutions for our problem (S)-(BC) under various assumptions on nonsingular functions f and g.
We present the basic assumptions that we shall use in the sequel.
(H1) are nondecreasing functions, , .
(H2) The functions are continuous and for all .
A pair of functions is a solution for our problem (S)-(BC) if and only if is a solution for the nonlinear integral system
We consider the Banach space with supremum norm and define the cone by .
We also define the operators by
and , by
Under the assumptions (H1) and (H2), using also Lemma 2.6, it is easy to see that , ℬ, and are completely continuous from P to P. Thus the existence and multiplicity of positive solutions of the system (S)-(BC) are equivalent to the existence and multiplicity of fixed points of the operator .
Theorem 3.1 Assume that (H1)-(H2) hold. If the functions f and g also satisfy the conditions:
(H3) There exist positive constants and such that
(H4) There exists a positive constant such that
then the problem (S)-(BC) has at least one positive solution , .
Proof Because the proof of the theorem is similar to that of Theorem 3.1 from [4], we will sketch some parts of it. From assumption (i) of (H3), we deduce that there exist such that
Then for , by using (8), Lemma 2.6, and Lemma 2.7, we obtain after some computations
where .
For c given in (H3), we define the cone , where . From our assumptions and Lemma 2.8, for any , we can easily show that and , that is, and .
We now consider the function , , with for all . We define the set
We will show that and M is a bounded subset of X. If , then there exists such that , . From the definition of , we have
where is defined by . Therefore, , and from the definition of , we get
From (ii) of assumption (H3), we conclude that for there exists such that
where , .
For and , by using Lemma 2.7 and the relations (9) and (11), it follows that
where .
Hence, , and so
Now from relations (10) and (12), one obtains , for all , that is, M is a bounded subset of X.
Besides, there exists a sufficiently large such that
From [2], we deduce that the fixed point index of the operator over with respect to P is
Next, from assumption (H4), we conclude that there exist and such that
where , , . Hence, for any and , we obtain
Therefore, by (14) and (15), we deduce that for any and
This implies that for all . From [2], we conclude that the fixed point index of the operator over with respect to P is
Combining (13) and (16), we obtain
We deduce that has at least one fixed point , that is, .
Let . Then is a solution of (S)-(BC). In addition . Indeed, if we suppose that , for all , then by using (H2) we have , for all . This implies , for all , which contradicts . The proof of Theorem 3.1 is completed. □
Using similar arguments as those used in the proofs of Theorem 3.2 and Theorem 3.3 in [4], we also obtain the following results for our problem (S)-(BC).
Theorem 3.2 Assume that (H1)-(H2) hold. If the functions f and g also satisfy the conditions:
(H5) There exists a positive constant such that
(H6) There exists such that
then the problem (S)-(BC) has at least one positive solution , .
Theorem 3.3 Assume that (H1)-(H3), and (H6) hold. If the functions f and g also satisfy the condition:
(H7) For each , and are nondecreasing with respect to u, and there exists a constant such that
where , , , and , are defined in Section 2, then the problem (S)-(BC) has at least two positive solutions , , .
4 The singular case
In this section, we investigate the existence of positive solutions for our problem (S)-(BC) under various assumptions on functions f and g which may be singular at and/or .
The basic assumptions used here are the following.
() ≡ (H1).
() The functions and there exist , , , with , , , such that
We consider the Banach space with supremum norm and define the cone by . We also define the operator by
Lemma 4.1 Assume that ()-() hold. Then is completely continuous.
Proof We denote by and . Using (), we deduce that and . By Lemma 2.6 and the corresponding lemma for , we see that maps P into P.
We shall prove that maps bounded sets into relatively compact sets. Suppose is an arbitrary bounded set. Then there exists such that for all . By using () and Lemma 2.7, we obtain for all , where , and . In what follows, we shall prove that is equicontinuous. By using Lemma 2.4, we have
Therefore, for any , we obtain
So, for any , we deduce
We denote
For the integral of the function h, by exchanging the order of integration, we obtain
For the integral of the function μ, we have
We deduce that . Thus for any given with and , by (17), we conclude
From (18), (19), and the absolute continuity of the integral function, we find that is equicontinuous. By the Ascoli-Arzelà theorem, we deduce that is relatively compact. Therefore is a compact operator. Besides, we can easily show that is continuous on P. Hence is completely continuous. □
Theorem 4.1 Assume that ()-() hold. If the functions f and g also satisfy the conditions:
() There exist with such that
() There exist with and such that
then the problem (S)-(BC) has at least one positive solution , .
Proof Because the proof of this theorem is similar to that of Theorem 3 in [5], we will sketch some parts of it. For c given in (), we consider the cone , where . Under assumptions ()-(), we obtain . By (), we deduce that there exist and such that
By using (20) and (), for any , we conclude
By the definition of , we can choose sufficiently large such that
From (), we deduce that there exist positive constants , , and such that
where and . From the assumption and the continuity of , we conclude that there exists sufficiently small such that for all , where . Therefore for any and , we have
By (22), (23), Lemma 2.7, and Lemma 2.8, for any and , we obtain
Therefore
By (21), (24), and the Guo-Krasnosel’skii fixed point theorem, we deduce that has at least one fixed point . Then our problem (S)-(BC) has at least one positive solution where . The proof of Theorem 4.1 is completed. □
Using similar arguments as those used in the proof of Theorem 2 in [5] (see also [14] for a particular case of the problem studied in [5]), we also obtain the following result for our problem (S)-(BC).
Theorem 4.2 Assume that ()-() hold. If the functions f and g also satisfy the conditions:
() There exist with such that
() There exist with and such that
then the problem (S)-(BC) has at least one positive solution , .
5 Examples
Let (), (),
and for all . Then and .
We consider the system of fractional differential equations
with the boundary conditions
Then we obtain , . We also deduce
and for all .
For the functions and , we obtain
and
Example 1 We consider the functions
where , , , , . We have , . Then . The functions and are nondecreasing with respect to u, for any , and for and the assumptions (H3) and (H6) are satisfied; indeed we obtain
We take and then and . If , then the assumption (H7) is satisfied. For example, if , , , and (e.g. ), then the above inequality is satisfied. By Theorem 3.3, we deduce that the problem ()-() has at least two positive solutions.
Example 2 We consider the functions
with and . Here and , where
We have , .
In (), for , and , we obtain
In (), for , , , and , we have
For example, if , , , , , , the above conditions are satisfied. Then, by Theorem 4.2, we deduce that the problem ()-() has at least one positive solution.
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Acknowledgements
The work of R Luca was supported by the CNCS grant PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0557, Romania.
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Henderson, J., Luca, R. Existence and multiplicity of positive solutions for a system of fractional boundary value problems. Bound Value Probl 2014, 60 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-2770-2014-60
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-2770-2014-60