Reaction-Diffusion-Advection Systems with Discontinuous Diffusion and Mass Control

In this paper, we study unique, globally defined uniformly bounded weak solutions for a class of semilinear reaction-diffusion-advection systems. The coefficients of the differential operators and the initial data are only required to be measurable and uniformly bounded. The nonlinearities are quasi-positive and satisfy a commonly called mass control or dissipation of mass property. Moreover, we assume the intermediate sum condition of a certain order. The key feature of this work is the surprising discovery that quasi-positive systems that satisfy an intermediate sum condition automatically give rise to a new class of $L^p$-energy type functionals that allow us to obtain requisite uniform a priori bounds. Our methods are sufficiently robust to extend to different boundary conditions, or to certain quasi-linear systems. We also show that in case of mass dissipation, the solution is bounded in sup-norm uniformly in time. We illustrate the applicability of results by showing global existence and large time behavior of models arising from a spatio-temporal spread of infectious disease.