Stability analysis for Maxwell's equation with a thermal effect in one space dimension (Q2259067)

The authors study a model accounting for the heating process of a 1D material by microwaves. After some transformations on Maxwell's equations and on the nonlinear heat equation, they obtain the coupled hyperbolic-parabolic system \(\varepsilon (x)w_{tt}=(\frac{1}{\mu (x)} w_{x})_{x}-\sigma (\theta )w_{t}\), \(b(\theta )_{t}=\theta _{xx}+\sigma (\theta )w_{t}^{2}\) posed in \((0,1)\times (0,T)\) where \(\varepsilon \) (resp. \(\mu \), \(\sigma \), \(b\)) is the electric permeability (resp. magnetic permeability, electric conductivity, enthalpy operator). The initial and boundary conditions \(w(0,t)=w(1,t)=\theta (0,t)=\theta (1,t)=0\), \(w(x,0)=0\), \(w_{t}(x,0)=e_{0}(x)\), \(\theta (x,0)=\theta _{0}(x)\) are imposed. Assuming first that \(b(s)=s-1\) if \(s<m\), \(b(s)=[-1,0]\) if \(s=m\), \(b(s)=s\) if \(s>m\), where \(m\) is the melting point, and \(\sigma (s)=\sigma _{sol}(s)\) if \(s\leq m \), \(\sigma (s)=\sigma _{liq}(s)\) if \(s>m\), for smooth functions \(\sigma _{sol},\sigma _{liq}\) and further hypotheses on the data, the authors prove the existence of a global weak solution \(w\in C(0,T;L^{2}(0,1))\), \(\theta \in L^{2}(0,T;H^{1}(0,1))\cap C(0,T;L^{2}(0,1))\) for every \(T>0\). The proof is obtained replacing \(b\) and \(\sigma \) by smooth functions depending on \( n\in \mathbb{N}\) and proving uniform estimates with respect to \(n\) in order to take the weak limits of the approximate solutions. Assuming now that \(b\) and \(\sigma \) are smooth (\(C^{1}\)) functions and further hypotheses on the data, the authors prove that \(w\), \(\theta \) and \(w_{t}\) tend to 0 in the \( L^{2}\)-norm as \(t\) tends to \(\infty \). In the last part of their paper, the authors present results of numerical simulations concerning this problem and based on Matlab packages.