Exact/approximate controllability of thermoelastic plates with variable thermal coefficients (Q1864097)

The authors continue an impressive sequence of articles on controllability of plates. A modified model of a Kirchhoff plate is coupled with a thermal input on a finite time interval. The modification consists of using a constant \(\gamma\), which is Timoshenko's constant coupling the mechanical vibrations to the rotational inertia. This model of a plate has been analyzed in considerable detail in previous Lasiecka-Triggiani papers. The plate is clamped with regard to displacements, and is assigned Dirichlet boundary conditions regarding the thermal input. In the topology assigned to this problem the exact controllability in the mechanical variables and approximate controllability in the thermal variable turns out to be compatible with the regularity in appropriate Sobolev spaces. The authors comment on past practices in determining controllability, which regarded controllability of thermo-elastic Kirchhoff plates as a perturbation of the classical Kirchhoff plate model. This worked well for distributed internal controls. Here the authors propose distributed control acting on the boundary layer. The authors comment that to achieve their results serious technical difficulties had to be dealt with. A backward uniqueness theorem, which concerned almost all problems regarding the thermal input, was proved, as well as a delicate observability estimate in what Lasiecka-Triggiani call the notoriously difficult setting of \(\overline L_2(\Omega)\times H^{-1}(\Omega)\) of energy for the wave equation with variable coefficients. Because of functional analytic complications arising in this class of problems, Lasiecka has introduced a new space \(\overline L_2(\Omega)\), which proved to be the right setting for the present problem. The present paper is a continuation of the extensive research project of Lasiecka-Triggiani, their colleagues and outstanding former Ph.D. students, such as D. Tataru, in the mathematical theory of plates.