Asymptotic behavior of second sound thermoelasticity with internal time-varying delay (Q2393634)

The author investigates the large-time behavior of solutions to an initial-boundary value problem for a one-dimensional thermoelastic system of second sound with internal time-varying decay, in which the time delay is added to Cattaneo's law for the heat flux. In the absence of delay, it is well-known that the one-dimensional thermoelastic system of second sound is exponentially stable as time goes to infinity. On the other hand, delay is a source of instability in many cases. This paper is concerned with effect of delay on the stability. Under suitable assumption on the delay term, the author establishes an exponential decay result for the system with internal time-varying delay. This means that the damping effect induced by heat-conduction given by Cattaneo's law is still strong enough to uniformly stabilize the system even in the presence of time delay. The main ingredients in the proof in this paper are the energy method and a suitable choice of multiplier.