On a family of torsional creep problems involving rapidly growing operators in divergence form

Let Ω⊂ℝN (N≥2) be a bounded domain with smooth boundary and {pn} be a sequence of real numbers converging to+∞ as n→∞. For each integer n>1, we define the function $\varphi_{n}(t)=p_{n} \vert t \vert^{p_{n}-2}te^{ \vert t \vert^{p_{n}}}$, for all t∈ℝ, and we prove the existence of a unique nonnegative variational solution for the problem−div(((φn(|∇ u(x)|))/(|∇ u(x)|))∇ u(x))=φn(1), when x∈Ω, subject to the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition. Next, we establish the uniform convergence in Ω of the sequence of solutions for the above family of equations to the distance function to the boundary of Ω. Our result complements the earlier developments on the topic obtained by Payne and Philippin [26], Kawohl [21], Bhattacharya, DiBenedetto and Manfredi [2], Perez-Llanos and Rossi [27] and Bocea and Mihăilescu [4].