Decay estimates for some semilinear damped hyperbolic problems (Q1108489)

The authors consider the asymptotic behaviour of solutions to a class of nonlinear damped hyperbolic problems at \(t\to +\infty\). A typical example is the semilinear wave equation \[ u_{tt}-\Delta u+g(u_ t)=h\quad in\quad (t,x)\in {\mathbb{R}}\quad +\times \Omega, \] where \(\Omega\) \(\subset {\mathbb{R}}^ n \)is a bounded domain and \(u=0\) on \({\mathbb{R}}\) \(+\times \partial \Omega\). If e.g. \(g(s)=c| s|^{p-1}s+d| s|^{q-1}s\) with \(c,d>0\) and \(1<p\leq q\leq (n+2)/(n-2)\) then the difference of two solutions is shown to decay like \(t^{-1/(p-1)}\) as \(t\to +\infty\). The method of proof is to use suitable functionals related to the energy functional and to show that they fulfill an ordinary differential inequality the solution of which has the desired asymptotic property. This method works in the autonomous as well as in the nonautonomous case. If g is a single power nonlinearity these results were partly known before by M. Nakao.