Uniform decay rates of solutions to a system of coupled PDEs with nonlinear internal dissipation. (Q1413604)

The author considers a coupled system of partial differential equations (PDEs) of hyperbolic/parabolic type. This system is a generalization of a structural acoustic model. A peculiar feature of the model is a high damping term in the boundary condition of the wave component which accounts for lack of uniform stability of the overall system even in the presence of viscous damping on the entire domain. As it is well known, introducing a comparable static damping in the boundary condition of the wave component uniformly stabilizes the corresponding feedback system. The author studies the stability properties of the coupled system when the internal damping is subject to nonlinear effects. He has proved two different stability results, which describe decay rates of the solutions to the coupled PDE system via a solution to an appropriate nonlinear ordinary differential equation. This approach allows saturation of the nonlinear dissipation term. Moreover, in this case uniform decay estimates of the underlying energy are obtained, provided that initial data are measured with a slight stronger topology. The stability criteria established in the paper yield, as well, new results on uniform stabilization of a single wave equation.