Hysteresis and periodic solutions of semilinear and quasilinear wave equations (Q1111081)

Recently much work has been done in the investigation of mathematical models of hysteresis phenomena and in applications in the theory of partial differential equations with hysteresis. The present paper is devoted to a detailed study (Sections 1, 2) of the Ishlinskiĭ hysteresis operator which has been introduced in the book of \textit{M. A. Krasnosel'skij} and \textit{A. V. Pokrovskij} [``Systems with hysteresis'' (1983)]. In Sections 3 and 4 we prove the existence of \(\omega\)-periodic solutions to the problems \[ (1)\quad u_{tt}-u_{xx}\pm F(u)=g(t,x),\quad u(t,0)=u(t,\pi)=0, \] \[ (2)\quad u_{tt}-F(u_ x)_ x=g(t,x),\quad u_ x(t,0)=u_ x(t,\pi)=0 \] for each (the assumptions are precised later) \(\omega\)-periodic right-hand side g, where F is the Ishlinskiĭ operator and \(\omega >0\) is arbitrary. These equations describe the forced longitudinal vibrations of a beam with elastico- plastic damping (1) and of an elastico-plastic beam (2). Equation (2) corresponds also to the one-dimensional Maxwell equation in a ferromagnetic medium. Notice that these existence results are due to special properties of the Ishlinskiĭ operator which enable us to obtain strong apriori estimates and to use the classical Galerkin method based on the compactness argument.