Suppression of blowup by slightly superlinear degradation in a parabolic–elliptic Keller–Segel system with signal-dependent motility

In this paper, we consider an initial–Neumann boundary value problem for a parabolic–elliptic Keller–Segel system with signal-dependent motility and a source term. Previous research has rigorously shown that the source-free version of this system exhibits an infinite-time blowup phenomenon when dimension $N\ge 2$. In the current work, when $N\le 3$, we establish uniform boundedness of global classical solutions with an additional source term that involves slightly super-linear degradation effect on the density, of a maximum growth order $slogs$, unveiling a sufficient blowup suppression mechanism. The motility function considered in our work takes a rather general form compared with recent works (Fujie and Jiang, 2020; Lyu and Wang, 2023) which were restricted to the monotone non-increasing case. The cornerstone of our proof lies in deriving an upper bound for the second component of the system and an entropy-like estimate, which are achieved through tricky comparison skills and energy methods, respectively.