Pullback exponential attractors with explicit fractal dimensions for non-autonomous partial functional differential equations

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose a new method to construct pullback exponential attractors with explicit fractal dimensions for non-autonomous infinite-dimensional dynamical systems in Banach spaces. The approach is established by combining the squeezing properties and the covering of finite subspace of Banach spaces, which generalize the method established for autonomous systems in Hilbert spaces (Eden A, Foias C, Nicolaenko B, and Temam R Exponential attractors for dissipative evolution equations, Wiley, New York, 1994). The method is especially effective for non-autonomous partial functional differential equations for which phase space decomposition based on the exponential dichotomy of the linear part or variation techniques are available for proving squeezing property. The theoretical results are illustrated by applications to several specific non-autonomous partial functional differential equations, including a retarded reaction–diffusion equation, a retarded 2D Navier–Stokes equation and a retarded semilinear wave equation. The constructed exponential attractors possess explicit fractal dimensions which do not depend on the entropy number but only on some inner characteristics of the studied equations including the spectra of the linear part and the Lipschitz constants of the nonlinear terms and hence do not require the smooth embedding between two spaces in the previous work.