On evolutionary problems with a-priori bounded gradients

We study a nonlinear evolutionary partial differential equation that can be viewed as a generalization of the heat equation where the temperature gradient is a~priori bounded but the heat flux provides merely \mbox{$L^1$-coercivity}. Applying higher differentiability techniques in space and time, choosing a special weighted norm (equivalent to the Euclidean norm in $\mathbb{R}^d$), incorporating finer properties of integrable functions and using the concept of renormalized solution, we prove long-time and large-data existence and uniqueness of weak solution, with an $L^1$-integrable flux, to an initial spatially-periodic problem for all values of a positive model parameter. If this parameter is smaller than $2/(d+1)$, where $d$ denotes the spatial dimension, we obtain higher integrability of the flux. As the developed approach is not restricted to a scalar equation, we also present an analogous result for nonlinear parabolic systems in which the nonlinearity, being the gradient of a strictly convex function, gives an a-priori $L^\infty$-bound on the gradient of the unknown solution.