Homogenization and corrector for the wave equation with discontinuous coefficients in time

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the homogenization of the wave equation with bounded variation coefficients in time, generalizing the classical result, which assumes Lipschitz-continuity. We start showing a general existence and uniqueness result for a general sort of hyperbolic equations. Then, we obtain our homogenization result comparing the solution of a sequence of wave equations to the solution of a sequence of elliptic ones. We conclude the paper making an analysis of the corrector. Firstly, we obtain a corrector result assuming that the derivative of the coefficients in the time variable is equicontinuous. This result was known for non-time dependent coefficients. After, we show, with a counterexample, that the regularity hypothesis for the corrector theorem is optimal in the sense that it does not hold if the time derivative of the coefficients is just bounded.