On a thin film model with insoluble surfactant

Abstract

This paper studies the existence and asymptotic behavior of global weak solutions for a thin film equation with insoluble surfactant under the influence of gravitational, capillary and van der Waals forces. We prove the existence of global weak solutions for \emph{medium sized} initial data in \emph{large function spaces}. Moreover, exponential decay towards the flat equilibrium state is established, where an estimate on the decay rate can be computed explicitly.