Positivity and qualitative properties of solutions of fourth-order elliptic equations

This thesis concerns the study of fourth-order elliptic boundary value problems and, in particular, qualitative properties of solutions. Such problems arise in various fields, from plate theory to conformal geometry and, compared to their second-order counterparts, they present intrinsic difficulties, mainly due to the lack of the maximum principle. In the first part of the thesis, we study the positivity of solutions in case of Steklov boundary conditions, which are intermediate between Dirichlet and Navier boundary conditions. They naturally appear in the study of the minimizers of the Kirchhoff-Love functional, which represents the energy of a hinged thin and loaded plate in dependence of a parameter. We establish sufficient conditions on the domain to obtain the positivity of the minimizers of the functional. Then, for such domains, we study a generalized version of the functional. Using variational techniques, we investigate existence and positivity of the ground states, as well as their asymptotic behaviour for the relevant values of the parameter. In the second part of the thesis we establish uniform a-priori bounds for a class of fourth-order semilinear problems in dimension 4 with exponential nonlinearities. We considered both Dirichlet and Navier boundary conditions and we suppose our nonlinearities positive and subcritical. Our arguments combine uniform estimates near the boundary and a blow-up analysis. Finally, by means of the degree theory, we obtain the existence of a positive solution.