A rigorous derivation and energetics of a wave equation with fractional damping (Q2062836)

The authors consider the coupled system accounting for the motion of longitudinal elastic waves of a membrane coupled to viscous flows in the enclosing half-space. This system is written as \(\rho _{memb}\overset{..}{U} =\kappa \Delta _{x}U-\mu \partial _{z}v\), \(\overset{.}{U}(t,x)=v(t,x,0)\), for \(t>0\), \(x\in \Sigma \subset \mathbb{R}^{d-1}\), where \(U\) is the horizontal displacement of the membrane, \(\Sigma \) represents the membrane, and \(v\) is the horizontal velocity of the viscous fluid which satisfies \( \rho _{bulk}\overset{.}{v}=\mu \Delta _{x,z}v\), for \(t>0\), \((x,z)\in \Omega =\Sigma \times (-\infty ,0)\).\ The authors introduce the associated energy \( \mathbb{E}(U,\overset{.}{U},v)=\int_{\Sigma }(\frac{\rho _{memb}}{2}\overset{ ..}{U}^{2}+\frac{\kappa }{2}\left\vert \nabla U\right\vert ^{2})dx+\int_{\Omega }\frac{\rho _{bulk}}{2}v^{2}dzdx\) and the functional space \(\mathbf{H}=H^{1}(\Sigma )\times L^{2}(\Sigma )\times L^{2}(\Omega )\), and they prove that \(\mathbb{E}\) acts as a Lyapunov function and that it is a bounded quadratic form on \(\mathbf{H}\). They introduce a non-dimensional form of this system \(\overset{..}{U}=\Delta _{x}U-\partial _{z}v\mid _{z=0}\) , \(\overset{.}{U}=v\mid _{z=0}\), for \(t>0\), \(x\in \Sigma \), \(\overset{.}{v} =\varepsilon ^{2}\Delta _{x}v+\partial _{z}^{2}v\) for \(t>0\), \((x,z)\in \Omega \), with \(\varepsilon =\mu /\sqrt{\rho _{memb}k}\), and the operator \( A_{\varepsilon }:D(A_{\varepsilon })\subset \mathbf{H}\rightarrow \mathbf{H}\) through \(A_{\varepsilon }\left( \begin{array}{c} U \\ V \\ v \end{array} \right) =\left( \begin{array}{c} V \\ \Delta _{x}U-\partial _{z}v\mid _{z=0} \\ \varepsilon ^{2}\Delta _{x}v+\partial _{z}^{2}v \end{array} \right) \). The first main result proves that the operator \(A_{\varepsilon }\) is the generator of a strongly continuous semigroup. The second main result of the paper describes the asymptotic behavior of the solution to the original problem when \(\varepsilon \) goes to 0: for every initial condition \( w_{0}\in \mathbf{H}\), the semi-group solution \(w^{\varepsilon }(t)=e^{tA_{\varepsilon }}w_{0}\) strongly converges to some limit \(w^{0}\). In the last part of their paper, the authors prove that the damped wave equation \(\overset{..}{U}(t,x)+\int_{0}^{t}\frac{1}{\sqrt{\pi (t-\tau )}} \overset{..}{U}(\tau ,x)d\tau =\Delta U(t,x)\) on \(\Sigma \) carries a natural energy-dissipation structure.