A phase field model of Cahn–Hilliard type for tumour growth with mechanical effects and damage

Abstract

We introduce a new diffuse interface model for tumour growth in the presence of a nutrient, in which we take into account mechanical effects and reversible tissue damage. The highly nonlinear PDEs system mainly consists of a Cahn–Hilliard type equation that describes the phase separation process between healthy and tumour tissue coupled to a parabolic reaction-diffusion equation for the nutrient and a hyperbolic equation for the balance of forces, including inertial and viscous effects. The main novelty of this work is the introduction of cellular damage, whose evolution is ruled by a parabolic differential inclusion. In this paper, we prove a global-in-time existence result for weak solutions by passing to the limit in a time-discretised and regularised version of the system.