In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence, uniqueness and global behavior of a positive continuous solution to some nonlinear Riemann-Liouville fractional boundary value problems. The nonlinearity is allowed to be singular at the boundary. The proofs are based on perturbation techniques after reducing the considered problem to the equivalent Fredholm integral equation of the second kind. Some examples are given to illustrate our main results.

We consider the following singular semilinear problem $$ \textstyle\begin{cases} \Delta u(x)+p(x)u^{\gamma }=0,\quad x\in D ~(\text{in the distributional sense}), \\ u>0,\quad \text{in }D, \\ \lim_{ \vert x \vert \rightarrow 0} \vert x \vert ^{n-2}u(x)=0, \\ \lim_{ \vert x \vert \rightarrow \infty }u(x)=0,\end{cases} $$ { Δ u ( x ) + p ( x ) u γ = 0 , x ∈ D ( in the distributional sense ) , u > 0 , in  D , lim | x | → 0 | x | n − 2 u ( x ) = 0 , lim | x | → ∞ u ( x ) = 0 , where $\gamma <1$ γ < 1 , $D=\mathbb{R}^{n}\backslash \{0\}$ D = R n ∖ { 0 } ($n\geq 3$ n ≥ 3 ) and p is a positive continuous function in D, which may be singular at $x=0$ x = 0 . Under sufficient conditions for the weighted function $p(x)$ p ( x ) , we prove the existence of a positive continuous solution on D, which could blow-up at the origin. The global asymptotic behavior of this solution is also obtained.