Integral Manifolds and Inertial Manifolds for Dissipative Partial Differential Equations

This work, the main results of which were announced in (CFNT), focuses on a new geometric explicit construction of inertial manifolds from integral manifolds generated by some initial dimensional surface. The method covers a large class of dissipative PDEs. The existence of a smooth integral manifold the closure of which in an inertial manifold M (i.E. containing X and uniformly exponentially attracting) requires a more detailed analysis of the geometric properties of the infinite dimensional flow. The method is explicity constructive, integrating forward in time and avoiding any fixed point theorems. The key geometric property upon which we base the construction of our integral inertial manifold M is a Spectral Blocking Property of the flow, which controls the evolution of the position of surface elements relative to the fixed reference frame associated to the linear principal part of the PDE.