Rates of decay for the wave systems with time dependent damping (Q717869)

An initial boundary value problem for the wave equation with a nonlinear time dependent damping is considered. To this problem the energy functional is associated. The damping is modeled by a continuous monotone increasing function on \({\mathbb R}\) with \(g(0)=0\). Without imposing any restrictions on the behavior of the damping, a non-autonomous observability estimate for the energy functional is proved. The rate of decay for the non-autonomous problem is determined from solving the Cauchy problem for an ordinary differential equation. In the section Applications, some methods for the explicit computation of the decay rate for the energy functional are indicated, followed by a set of examples.