Scaling effects and homogenization of reaction-diffusion problems with nonlinear drift

Abstract

We study the periodic homogenization of reaction-diffusion problems with nonlinear drift describing the transport of interacting particles in composite materials. The microscopic model is derived as the hydrodynamic limit of a totally asymmetric simple exclusion process for a population of interacting particles crossing a domain with obstacles. We are particularly interested in exploring how the scalings of the drift affect the structure of the upscaled model. We first look into a situation when the interacting particles cross a thin layer that has a periodic microstructure. To understand the effective transmission condition, we perform homogenization together with the dimension reduction of the aforementioned reaction-diffusion-drift problem with variable scalings. One particular physically interesting scaling that we look at separately is when the drift is very large compared to both the diffusion and reaction rate. In this case, we consider the overall process taking place in an unbounded porous media. Since we have the presence of a large nonlinear drift in the microscopic problem, we first upscale the model using the formal asymptotic expansions with drift. Then, with the help of two-scale convergence with drift, we rigorously derive the homogenization limit for a similar microscopic problem with a nonlinear Robin-type boundary condition. Additionally, we show the strong convergence of the corrector function. In the large drift case, the resulting upscaled equation is a nonlinear reaction-dispersion equation that is strongly coupled with a system of nonlinear elliptic cell problems. We study the solvability of a similar strongly coupled two-scale system with nonlinear dispersion by constructing an iterative scheme. Finally, we illustrate the behavior of the solution using the iterative scheme.