Dissipative solutions for viscoelastic phase separation with degenerate mobility: a dynamic transport approach

Abstract: We study the convergence of minimising movement approximations to weak solutions of a fourth-order viscoelastic phase separation system with degenerate concave mobility. The underlying semi-implicit variational scheme combines a dynamic transport distance for the phase-field variable with a weighted $L<sup>2$-distance for a transformed stress variable. We establish subsequential convergence of the scheme and show that the limiting solutions satisfy the energy-dissipation inequality. To this end, we derive a coercivity estimate for the metric slope, which yields the required space-time regularity for the De Giorgi interpolant, and construct constitutive fluxes whose dissipation is controlled by the squared metric slope. These estimates allow us to pass to the limit in the discrete energy-dissipation inequality. The weak formulation of the evolution equation for the phase-field variable is derived using the flow interchange technique. Under additional assumptions on the data, we further show that the limiting solutions satisfy an entropy-dissipation inequality