This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop Energy Methods for Free Boundary Problems in Continuum Mechanics, held in Oviedo, Spain, from March 21 to March 23, 1994. It is well known that the conservation laws and the constitutive equations of Continuum Mechanics lead to complicated coupled systems of partial differential equations to which, as a rule, one fails to apply the techniques usually employed in the studies of scalar uncoupled equations such as, for instance, the maximum principle. The study of the qualitative behaviour of solutions of the systems re quires different...

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop Energy Methods for Free Boundary Problems in Continuum Mechanics, held in Oviedo, Spain, from March 21 to March 23, 1994. It is well known that the conservation laws and the constitutive equations of Continuum Mechanics lead to complicated coupled systems of partial differential equations to which, as a rule, one fails to apply the techniques usually employed in the studies of scalar uncoupled equations such as, for instance, the maximum principle. The study of the qualitative behaviour of solutions of the systems re quires different...

For the past several decades, the study of free boundary problems has been a very active subject of research occurring in a variety of applied sciences. What these problems have in common is their formulation in terms of suitably posed initial and boundary value problems for nonlinear partial differential equations. Such problems arise, for example, in the mathematical treatment of the processes of heat conduction, filtration through porous media, flows of non-Newtonian fluids, boundary layers, chemical reactions, semiconductors, and so on. The growing interest in these problems is reflected...

Progress in different fields of mechanics, such as filtra- tion theory, elastic-plastic problems, crystallization pro- cesses, internal and surface waves, etc., is governed to a great extent by the advances in the study of free boundary problems for nonlinear partial differential equations. Free boundary problems form a scientific area which attracts attention of many specialists in mathematics and mechanics. Increasing interest in the field has given rise to the "International Conferences on Free Boundary Problems and Their Applications" which have convened, since the 1980s, in such...