On variational methods for a class of damped vibration problems (Q2474820)

Damped vibration problems are studied by using some general recently obtained variational principles due to Ricceri. Namely, the authors investigate the existence of solutions and their multiplicity for the problems \[ \begin{aligned} & \ddot{u}(t) +q(t) u(t) =A(t) u(t) +\nabla F(t,u(t))\quad\text{for a.e. }t\in [ 0,T], \\ & u(0) -u(T) =\dot{u}(0) -e^{Q(t) }\dot{u}(T) =0,\end{aligned} \] and \[ \begin{aligned} & \ddot{u}(t) +q(t) u(t) =A(t) u(t) +\lambda \nabla F(t,u(t))\quad\text{for a.e. }t\in [ 0,T], \\ & u(0) -u(T) =\dot{u}(0) -e^{Q(\theta)}\dot{u}(T) =0,\end{aligned} \] where \(T>0\), \(\lambda >0\), \(q\in L^{1}(0,T;R) \), \(Q(t) =\int_{0}^{t}q(s) ds\), \(A\) is a symmetric \(N\times N\) matrix-valued function with coefficients \(a_{ij}\in L^{\infty }(0,T;R) \) and such that \(A(t) \xi \cdot \xi \geq \theta| \xi |^{2}\) for a certain constant \(\theta >0\) and all \(\xi \in R^{N}\). \(F\) is measurable in \(t\) for any \(x\in R^{N}\) and continuously differentiable in \(x\) for a.e. \(t\in [ 0,T] \) and \[ | F(t,x) | \leq a(| x|) b(t) ,\qquad | \nabla F(t,x) | \leq a(| x|) b(t) \] for all \(x\in \mathbb{R}^{N}\) and a.e. \(t\in [ 0,T] \), where \(b\in L^{1}(0,T;\mathbb{R}^{+}) \), \(a\in C(\mathbb{R}^{+},\mathbb{R}^{+}) \) The authors start with investigating on \(H_{T}^{1}\) (with a suitably chosen norm related to the type of boundary conditions) the relevant action functionals for both problems. Next they give some further assumptions on the nonlinear term which lead to the existence of at least one solution. The existence of three solutions is obtained in the case when a bound for the norm of the solutions is known. Moreover, sequences of unbounded solutions are obtained and also a sequence of solutions strongly converging to \(0\) in \(H_{T}^{1}\) is obtained under suitable further growth assumptions on the nonlinear term. Examples of nonlinearities satisfying some of the assumptions introduced in the paper are given.