A nonlinear parabolic system arising in damage mechanics under chemical aggression

We show that a nonlinear degenerate parabolic system, describing damage accumulation in the presence of chemical aggression, is well posed. Moreover its solutions blow up in finite time and a nontrivial characterization of the blow-up set is given. Under certain conditions on the initial configuration, the blow-up set is an interval of nonzero measure and a lower and upper bound of its length are given in terms of the internal microstructural parameter λ.