Stabilization of a locally damped thermoelastic system (Q1001756)

From the Introduction of the paper: ``In this work we study decay properties of the solutions of the following initial boundary-value problem associated with the thermoelastic system: \[ u_{tt}-a^2\Delta u-(b^2-a^2)\nabla\text{div} u+\nabla\theta+\rho(x,u_t)=0,\quad \text{in}\;\Omega\times(0,\infty), \] \[ \theta_t-\Delta\theta+\text{div}u_t=0,\quad\text{in}\;\Omega\times(0,\infty), \] \[ u(x,0)=u_0(x),\;u_t(x,0)=u_1(x),\;\theta(x,0)=\theta_0, \quad\text{in}\;\Omega, \] \[ u(x,t)=0,\;\theta(x,t)=0,\quad \text{on}\;\Gamma\times (0,\infty), \] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain in \(\mathbb R^N\), \(N\geq 2\), \(u(x,t)=(u^1(x,t),\dots,u^N(x,t))\) is the vector displacement, and \(\theta\) represents the temperature distribution. The vector function \(\rho\) is a dissipative term, localized in a neighborhood of part of the boundary of \(\Omega\). The coefficients \(a\) and \(b\) are related to the Lamé coefficients of Elasticity Theory and \(b^2>a^2>0\). In this paper, we show the uniform stabilization of the total energy for the systems with algebraic rates, where the dissipative term \(\rho(x,u_t)\) is strongly nonlinear and effective only in a neighborhood of part of the boundary. When the nonlinear dissipative term \(\rho(x,s)\) behaves linearly for small \(s\) and the dimension is two, we obtain an exponential decay rate for the total energy of the system. If the dimension \(N\geq 3\) and \(\rho(x,s)\) behaves linearly for all \(s\), then the decay rate is also exponential.''