Global stability of the Armstrong-Frederick model with periodic biaxial inputs (Q879909)

From the authors' abstract: ``The paper is concerned with the study of plasticity models described by differential equations with stop and play operators. We suggest sufficient conditions for the global stability of a unique periodic solutions for scalar models and for vector models with biaxial inputs of a particular form \dots.'' In particular, the authors are interested in the constitutive laws of such models, which are given by the so-called Armstrong-Frederick model. They consider two different problems: the stress-controlled and the strain-controlled ones, which may be respectively described by the equations \[ \begin{alignedat}{3} &\dot u+\dot\theta+(\theta-x)|\dot\xi| /R, &\quad &x={\mathcal S}_r(u,x_0;t_0), &\quad &\xi=u-x,\\ &\dot u=\dot\theta+(\theta-(1-z)u-zx)|\dot\xi| /K, &\quad&x={\mathcal S}_r(u,x_0;t_0), &\quad&\xi=u-x.\end{alignedat} \] Here, \(\theta\in W^{1,1}_{\text{loc}} (t_0,\infty;{\mathbb R}^n)\) is the input (the control), \({\mathcal S}_r\) is a stop-type hysteresis operator applied to \(u\) with initial state \(x_0\), while \(R\) and \(K\) are fixed positive constants and \(0<z<1\) is also fixed. Under suitable assumptions on the form of the periodic input \(\theta\), the authors prove, for both problems, the global asymptotic stability of the solutions \((x,u)\). Moreover, they exhibit a counterexample to such results when the assumptions on the input are not satisfied.