This work deals with a fully parabolic chemotaxis model with nonlinear production and chemoattractant. The problem is formulated on a bounded domain and, depending on a specific interplay between the coefficients associated to such production and chemoattractant, we establish that the related initial-boundary value problem has a unique classical solution which is uniformly bounded in time. To be precise, we study this zero-flux problem
$$ \textstyle\begin{cases} u_{t}= \Delta u - \nabla \cdot (f(u) \nabla v) & \text{ in } \Omega \times (0,T_{max}), \\ v_{t}=\Delta v-v+g(u) & \text{ in } \Omega \times (0,T_{max}), \end{cases} $$
{
u
t
=
Δ
u
−
∇
⋅
(
f
(
u
)
∇
v
)
in
Ω
×
(
0
,
T
m
a
x
)
,
v
t
=
Δ
v
−
v
+
g
(
u
)
in
Ω
×
(
0
,
T
m
a
x
)
,
where $\Omega $
Ω
is a bounded and smooth domain of $\mathbb{R}^{n}$
R
n
, for $n\geq 2$
n
≥
2
, and $f(u)$
f
(
u
)
and $g(u)$
g
(
u
)
are reasonably regular functions generalizing, respectively, the prototypes $f(u)=u^{\alpha }$
f
(
u
)
=
u
α
and $g(u)=u^{l}$
g
(
u
)
=
u
l
, with proper $\alpha , l>0$
α
,
l
>
0
. After having shown that any sufficiently smooth $u(x,0)=u_{0}(x)\geq 0$
u
(
x
,
0
)
=
u
0
(
x
)
≥
0
and $v(x,0)=v_{0}(x)\geq 0$
v
(
x
,
0
)
=
v
0
(
x
)
≥
0
produce a unique classical and nonnegative solution $(u,v)$
(
u
,
v
)
to problem (◊), which is defined on $\Omega \times (0,T_{max})$
Ω
×
(
0
,
T
m
a
x
)
with $T_{max}$
T
m
a
x
denoting the maximum time of existence, we establish that for any $l\in (0,\frac{2}{n})$
l
∈
(
0
,
2
n
)
and $\frac{2}{n}\leq \alpha <1+\frac{1}{n}-\frac{l}{2}$
2
n
≤
α
<
1
+
1
n
−
l
2
, $T_{max}=\infty $
T
m
a
x
=
∞
and $u$
u
and $v$
v
are actually uniformly bounded in time.The paper is in line with the contribution by Horstmann and Winkler (J. Differ. Equ. 215(1):52–107, 2005) and, moreover, extends the result by Liu and Tao (Appl. Math. J. Chin. Univ. Ser. B 31(4):379–388, 2016). Indeed, in the first work it is proved that for $g(u)=u$
g
(
u
)
=
u
the value $\alpha =\frac{2}{n}$
α
=
2
n
represents the critical blow-up exponent to the model, whereas in the second, for $f(u)=u$
f
(
u
)
=
u
, corresponding to $\alpha =1$
α
=
1
, boundedness of solutions is shown under the assumption $0< l<\frac{2}{n}$
0
<
l
<
2
n
.