Study of exponential stability of coupled wave systems via distributed stabilizer (Q1607769)

The author investigates the following system of coupled wave equations \[ u_{tt}- c_{1} ^{2} u _{xx} = \alpha (v-u)+\beta (v_{t}-u_{t}), \text{ in } (0,1)\times (0, \infty), \] \[ v_{tt}- c_{2} ^{2} v _{xx} = \alpha (u-v)+\beta (u_{t}-v_{t}), \text{ in } (0,1)\times (0, \infty), \] where the \( c _{1}, c_{2}\) are positive constants and where the \(\alpha ,\beta \) may depend on \(x\) but \( \beta \) must be positive. To the system standard initial conditions of form \( u(x,0)= f _{1}, u_{t}(x,0)= g _{1}, v(x,0)= f _{2}, v_{t}(x,0)= g _{2}\) and boundary conditions of Dirichlet type (\(u=v=0\) for \(x=0\) respectively \(x=1\)) or of Dirchlet-Neumann type (\(u(0,t)=0,u_{x}(1,t)=0, v(0,t)=v(1,t)=0\)) are added. The main goal is to establish exponential decay for the solutions when \( t \rightarrow \infty\). Since the author apparently reduces his main result to previously known results, this seems not out of reach, but had I been the referee for accepting the paper, I would have asked for additional details when during the argument he claims that ``without loss of generality'' he can assume that \( \alpha (x)=\beta (x)\) may be assumed to be equal to ``one''.