Function spaces, time derivatives and compactness for evolving families of Banach spaces with applications to PDEs

We develop a functional framework suitable for the treatment of partial differential equations and variational problems posed on evolving families of Banach spaces. We propose a definition for the weak time derivative which does not rely on the availability of an inner product or Hilbertian structure and explore conditions under which the spaces of weakly differentiable functions (with values in an evolving Banach space) relate to the classical Sobolev--Bochner spaces. An Aubin--Lions compactness result in this setting is also proved. We then analyse several concrete examples of function spaces over time-evolving spatial domains and hypersurfaces for which we explicitly provide the definition of the time derivative and verify isomorphism properties with the aforementioned Sobolev--Bochner spaces. We conclude with the formulation and proof of well posedness for a class of nonlinear monotone problems on an abstract evolving space (generalising in particular the evolutionary $p$-Laplace equation on a moving domain or surface) and identify some additional evolutionary problems that can be appropriately formulated with the abstract setting developed in this work.