The aim of this thesis is to study the large time behavior of solutions of nonlocal evolution equations and to also study the singular limit of equations and systems of parabolic partial differential equations involving a small parameter epsilon. In Chapter 1, we consider a nonlocal reaction-diffusion equation with mass conservation, which was originally proposed by Rubinstein and Sternberg as a model for phase separation in a binary mixture. The corresponding Neumann problem possesses a Lyapunov functional, namely a functional which decreases in time along solution orbits. After having proved that the solution is conned in an invariant region, we study its large time behavior and apply a Lojasiewicz inequality to show that it converges to a stationary solution as t tends to infinity. We also evaluate the rate of convergence and precisely compute the limiting stationary solution in one space dimension. Chapter 2 is devoted to the study of a nonlocal evolution equation which one obtains by neglecting the diffusion term in the nonlocal Allen-Cahn equation studied in Chapter 1. Without the diffusion term, the solution can not be expected to be more regular than the initial function. Moreover, because of the absence of the diusion term, the method of Chapter 1 can not be applied to study the large time behavior of the solution. We present a new method based up on rearrangement theory and the study of the solution profile. We show that the solution stabilizes for large times and give a detailed characterization of its asymptotic limit as t tends to infinity. More precisely, it turns out that the limiting function is a step function, which takes at most two values, which are stable points of a corresponding ordinary dierential equation. We also show by means of a nontrivial counterexample that, when a certain hypothesis on the initial function does not hold, the limiting function may take three values. One of them is the unstable point and the two others are the stable points of the ordinary dierential equation. We study in Chapter 3 a nonlocal ordinary dierential equation which has been proposed by M. Nagayama. The nonlocal term involves a denominator which may vanish. We apply a contraction fixed point theorem to prove the existence of a unique solution which stays confined in an invariant region. We also show that the corresponding initial value problem possesses a Lyapunov functional and prove that the solution stabilizes for large times to a step function, which takes at most two values. In Chapter 4, we consider a diffuse-interface tumor-growth model which involves a fourth order Cahn-Hilliard type equation. Introducing a related phase-field model, we formally study the singular limit of the solution as the reaction coecient tends to infinity. More precisely, we show that the solution converges to the solution of a moving boundary problem. AMS subject classifications. 35K57, 35K50, 35K20, 35R35, 35R37, 35B40, 35B25.
