The paper deals with lower bounds for the remainder term in asymptotics for a certain class of arithmetic functions. Typically, these are generated by a Dirichlet series of the form ζ 2(s)ζ(2s−1)ζ M(2s)H(s), where M is an arbitrary integer and H(s) has an Euler product which converges absolutely for R s > σ0, with some fixed σ0 < 1/2.

Let $\mathbb{P}=\{p_1,p_2,\cdots ,p_i,\cdots \}$ be the set of prime numbers (or more generally a set of pairwise co-prime elements). Let us denote $A_p^{a,b}=\{p^{an+b}m\mid n\in \mathbb{N}\cup \left\{0\right\};m\in \mathbb{N},p\mathrm{does}\mathrm{not}\mathrm{divide}m\}$, where $a\in \mathbb{N},b\in \mathbb{N}\cup \left\{0\right\}$. Then for arbitrary finite set $B$, $B\subset \mathbb{P}$ holds $$d\left(\bigcap _{p_i\in B}{A}_{p_i}^{a_i,b_i}\right)=\prod _{p_i\in B}d\left(A_{p_i}^{a_i,b_i}\right),$$ and $$d\left(A_{p_i}^{a_i,b_i}\right)=\frac{\frac{1}{p_i^{b_i}}\left(1-\frac{1}{p_i}\right)}{1-\frac{1}{p_i^{a_i}}}.$$ If we denote $$A=\left\{\frac{\frac{1}{p^b}\left(1-\frac{1}{p}\right)}{1-\frac{1}{p^a}}\mid p\in \mathbb{P},a\in \mathbb{N},b\in \mathbb{N}\cup \left\{0\right\}\right\},$$ where $\mathbb{P}$ is the set of all prime numbers, then for closure of set $A$ holds $$\mathrm{cl}A=A\cup B\cup \{0,1\},$$ where $B=\left\{\frac{1}{p^b}\left(1-\frac{1}{p}\right)\mid p\in \mathbb{P},b\in \mathbb{N}\cup \left\{0\right\}\right\}$.

Let $c_q\left(n\right)$ be the Ramanujan sum, i.e. $c_q\left(n\right)={\sum }_{d\left|\right(q,n)}d\mu (q/d)$, where μ is the Möbius function. In a paper of Chan and Kumchev (2012), asymptotic formulas for ${\sum }_{n\le y}{\left({\sum }_{q\le x}{c}_q\left(n\right)\right)}^k$ (k = 1,2) are obtained. As an analogous problem, we evaluate ${\sum }_{n\le y}{\left({\sum }_{n\le x}c{̂}_q\left(n\right)\right)}^k$ (k = 1,2), where $c{̂}_q\left(n\right):={\sum }_{d\left|\right(q,n)}d\left|\mu (q/d)\right|$.

Let 1 < k < 33/29. We prove that if λ₁, λ₂ and λ₃ are non-zero real numbers, not all of the same sign and such that λ₁/λ₂ is irrational, and ϖ is any real number, then for any ε > 0 the inequality $|\lambda ₁p₁+\lambda ₂p²₂+\lambda ₃p{₃}^k+\varpi |\le {\left(ma{x}_j{p}_j\right)}^{-(33-29k)/\left(72k\right)+\epsilon }$ has infinitely many solutions in prime variables p₁, p₂, p₃.