The wave equation with a boundary control at the left endpoint and with free right endpoint and the complete vibration damping problem (Q5942179)

Most mathematicians working on wave propagation and control of waves had a feeling that almost anything that can be said about the one-dimensional case (1) \(u_{xx}-u_{tt}=0\), with all the possible variants of end conditions, has been researched already by somebody, starting with an important control theory paper of D. L. Russell in 1964. The names of Pontryagin, Butkovskij, Lions, Il'in, Tikhomirov, Marcus, and many, many others come to mind. The present authors discovered a problem that seems to have escaped the attention of control theorists, that not all possible mixed problems were considered in the existing literature, and in particular the problem where a string is controlled at one end, with the other end free. The authors define very carefully three kinds of mixed boundary and initial value on the rectangle \(Q_T=\{t\in[0,T]\), \(x\in[0,\ell]\}\), where the following conditions are given: (I) \(u(0,t)=\mu(x), u_x(\ell,t)=0\), (2) \(u(x,0)= \varphi (x)\), \(u_t(x,0)= \psi(x)\) (3), or (II), where conditions (2) are combined with \(u(x,T)= \varphi_1(x)\), \(u_t(x,T)= \psi_1(x)\) (4), or (III), where conditions (3) and (4) are combined with \(u_x(\ell,t)=0\) for all \(t\) (5). These problems are considered in the spaces \(W^2_2(Q_T)\), except for \(\psi\) and \(\psi_1\), which are in \(W^1_2([0,\ell))\). They prove that the mixed problems (I) and (II) have at most one solution, which belongs to the class \(W_2^2(Q_T)\). In fact, they prove that membership in this class of Sobolev functions is a necessary condition for solvability of problem (III). They also show that if \(0<T <2\ell\) then rather complex integrability conditions involving \(T+x\) and \(T-x\) must be obeyed. The author comments that some wave propagation control problems in the theory of beams, plates and shells should undergo a similar careful scrutiny to confirm some results on controllability and observability that seem to be accepted as true in the engineering folklore. Two important theorems on exact controllability, and on exact excitation, bringing a quiescent state to a given exact displacement and velocity at a time \(T<2\ell\) are shown to be corollaries to their main theorem. This work fills an important gap in our knowledge of wave propagation in one dimension.