Decay Rates of Interactive Hyperbolic-Parabolic PDE Models with Thermal Effects on the Interface

We consider coupled PDE systems comprising of a hyperbolic and a parabolic-like equation with an interface on a portion of the boundary. These models are motivated by structural acoustic problems. A specific prototype consists of a wave equation defined on a three-dimensional bounded domain Ω coupled with a thermoelastic plate equation defined on Γ ₀—a flat surface of the boundary \partial Ω . Thus, the coupling between the wave and the plate takes place on the interface Γ ₀. The main issue studied here is that of uniform stability of the overall interactive model. Since the original (uncontrolled) model is only strongly stable, but not uniformly stable, the question becomes: what is the ``minimal amount' of dissipation necessary to obtain uniform decay rates for the energy of the overall system? Our main result states that boundary nonlinear dissipation placed only on a suitable portion of the part of the boundary which is complementary to Γ <sub>0</sub>, suffices for the stabilization of the entire structure. This result is new with respect to the literature on several accounts: (i) thermoelasticity is accounted for in the plate model; (ii) the plate model does not account for any type of mechanical damping, including the structural damping most often considered in the literature; (iii) there is no mechanical damping placed on the interface Γ <sub>0</sub>; (iv) the boundary damping is nonlinear without a prescribed growth rate at the origin; (v) the undamped portions of the boundary \partial Ω are subject to Neumann (rather than Dirichlet) boundary conditions, which is a recognized difficulty in the context of stabilization of wave equations, due to the fact that the strong Lopatinski condition does not hold. The main mathematical challenge is to show how the thermal energy is propagated onto the hyperbolic component of the structure. This is achieved by using a recently developed sharp theory of boundary traces corresponding to wave and plate equations, along with the analytic estimates recently established for the co-continuous semigroup associated with thermal plates subject to free boundary conditions. These trace inequalities along with the analyticity of the thermoelastic plate component allow one to establish appropriate inverse/ recovery type estimates which are critical for uniform stabilization. Our main result provides ``optimal' uniform decay rates for the energy function corresponding to the full structure. These rates are described by a suitable nonlinear ordinary differential equation, whose coefficients depend on the growth of the nonlinear dissipation at the origin. \par Accepted 12 May 2000. Online publication 6 October 2000.     

A trace regularity result for thermoelastic equations with application to optimal boundary control

We consider a mixed problem for a Kirchoff thermoelastic plate model with clamped boundary conditions. We establish a sharp regularity result for the outer normal derivative of the thermal velocity on the boundary. The proof, based upon interpolation techniques, benefits from the exceptional regularity of traces of solutions to the elastic Kirchoff equation. This result, which complements recent results obtained by the second and third authors, is critical in the study of optimal control problems associated with the thermoelastic system when subject to thermal boundary control. Indeed, the present regularity estimate can be interpreted as a suitable control-theoretic property of the corresponding abstract dynamics, which is crucial to guarantee well-posedness for the associated differential Riccati equations.     

Existence of Periodic Solutions for the Quasi-Static Thermoelastic Thermistor Problem

We deal with a new model for the thermistor problem formulated as a coupled system of PDE’s involving nonlinear energy heat equation, stationary charge conservation equation of electrical current and thermoelastic equations of displacement. We establish the existence of weak periodic solutions rewriting our system as an abstract problem in order to utilize the maximal monotone mappings theory and a fixed point argument for a suitable operator equation.      

Anti-selfdual Lagrangians II: unbounded non self-adjoint operators and evolution equations

New variational principles based on the concept of anti-selfdual (ASD) Lagrangians were recently introduced in “AIHP-Analyse non linéaire, 2006”. We continue here the program of using such Lagrangians to provide variational formulations and resolutions to various basic equations and evolutions which do not normally fit in the Euler-Lagrange framework. In particular, we consider stationary boundary value problems of the form as well ass dissipative initial value evolutions of the form where is a convex potential on an infinite dimensional space, A is a linear operator and is any scalar. The framework developed in the above mentioned paper reformulates these problems as and respectively, where is an “ASD” vector field derived from a suitable Lagrangian L. In this paper, we extend the domain of application of this approach by establishing existence and regularity results under much less restrictive boundedness conditions on the anti-selfdual Lagrangian L so as to cover equations involving unbounded operators. Our main applications deal with various nonlinear boundary value problems and parabolic initial value equations governed by transport operators with or without a diffusion term. Nassif Ghoussoub research was partially supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The author gratefully acknowledges the hospitality and support of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques in Montréal where this work was initiated. Leo Tzou’s research was partially supported by a doctoral postgraduate scholarship from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

Existence and Exponential Decay of Solutions to a Quasilinear Thermoelastic Plate System

We consider a quasilinear PDE system which models nonlinear vibrations of a thermoelastic plate defined on a bounded domain in , n ≤ 3. Existence of finite energy solutions describing the dynamics of a nonlinear thermoelastic plate is established. In addition asymptotic long time behavior of weak solutions is discussed. It is shown that finite energy solutions decay exponentially to zero with the rate depending only on the (finite energy) size of initial conditions. The proofs are based on methods of weak compactness along with nonlocal partial differential operator multipliers which supply the sought after “recovery” inequalities. Regularity of solutions is also discussed by exploiting the underlying analyticity of the linearized semigroup along with a related maximal parabolic regularity [1, 16, 44]. The research of I. Lasiecka has been partially supported by DMS-NSF Grant Nr 0606882. S. Maad was supported by the Swedish Research Council and by the European Union under the Marie Curie Fellowship MEIF-CT-2005-024191.     

Stability of Timoshenko systems with thermal coupling on the bending moment

The Timoshenko system is a distinguished coupled pair of differential equations arising in mathematical elasticity. In the case of constant coefficients, if a damping is added in only one of its equations, it is well‐known that exponential stability holds if and only if the wave speeds of both equations are equal. In the present paper we study both non‐homogeneous and homogeneous thermoelastic problems where the model's coefficients are non‐constant and constants, respectively. Our main stability results are proved by means of a unified approach that combines local estimates of the resolvent equation in the semigroup framework with a recent control‐observability analysis for static systems. Therefore, our results complement all those on the linear case provided in [22], by extending the methodology employed in [4] to the case of Timoshenko systems with thermal coupling on the bending moment.     

Well-posedness and sharp uniform decay rates at the L 2(Ω)-Level of the Schrödinger equation with nonlinear boundary dissipation

We prove that the Schr?dinger equation defined on a bounded open domain of and subject to a certain attractive, nonlinear, dissipative boundary feedback is (semigroup) well-posed on L₂(Ω) for any n = 1, 2, 3, ..., and, moreover, stable on L₂(Ω) for n = 2, 3, with sharp (optimal) uniform rates of decay. Uniformity is with respect to all initial conditions contained in a given L₂(Ω)-ball. This result generalizes the corresponding linear case which was proved recently in [L-T-Z.2]. Both results critically rely—at the outset—on a far general result of interest in its own right: an energy estimate at the L₂(Ω)-level for a fully general Schr?dinger equation with gradient and potential terms. The latter requires a heavy use of pseudo-differential/micro-local machinery [L-T-Z.2, Section 10], to shift down the more natural H¹(Ω)-level energy estimate to the L₂(Ω)-level. In the present nonlinear boundary dissipation case, the resulting energy estimate is then shown to fit into the general uniform stabilization strategy, first proposed in [La-Ta.1] in the case of wave equations with nonlinear (interior and) boundary dissipation.     

Characteristic boundary layers for parabolic perturbations of quasilinear hyperbolic problems

In this paper, we study the existence and nonlinear stability of the totally characteristic boundary layer for the quasilinear equations with positive definite viscosity matrix under the assumption that the boundary matrix vanishes identically on the boundary x=0. We carry out a series of weighted estimates to the boundary layer equations—Prandtl type equations to get the regularity and the far field behavior of the solutions. This allows us to perform a weighted energy estimate for the error equation to prove the stability of the boundary layers. The stability result finally implies the asymptotic limit of the viscous solutions.     

Stability analysis of coupled structural acoustics PDE models under thermal effects and with no additional dissipation

In this study we consider a coupled system of partial differential equations (PDE's) which describes a certain structural acoustics interaction. One component of this PDE system is a wave equation, which serves to model the interior acoustic wave medium within a given three dimensional chamber Ω. This acoustic wave equation is coupled on a boundary interface Γ₀ to a two dimensional system of thermoelasticity: this thermoelastic PDE is composed in part of a structural beam or plate equation, which governs the vibrations of flexible wall portion Γ₀ of the chamber Ω. Moreover, this elastic dynamics is coupled to a heat equation which also evolves on Γ₀, and which imparts a thermal damping onto the entire structural acoustic system. As we said, the interaction between the wave and thermoelastic PDE components takes place on the boundary interface Γ₀, and involves coupling boundary terms which are above the level of finite energy. We analyze the stability properties of this coupled structural acoustics PDE model, in the absence of any additive feedback dissipation on the hard walls Γ₁ of the boundary . Under a certain geometric assumption on Γ₁, an assumption which has appeared in the literature in connection with structural acoustic flow, and which allows for the invocation of a recently derived microlocal boundary trace estimate, we show that classical solutions of this thermally damped structural acoustics PDE decay uniformly to zero, with a rational rate of decay.     

Necessity of a Wiener type condition for boundary regularity of quasiminimizers and nonlinear elliptic equations

We use variational methods to obtain a pointwise estimate near a boundary point for quasisubminimizers of the p-energy integral and other integral functionals in doubling metric measure spaces admitting a p-Poincaré inequality. It implies a Wiener type condition necessary for boundary regularity for p-harmonic functions on metric spaces, as well as for (quasi)minimizers of various integral functionals and solutions of nonlinear elliptic equations on R ⁿ .     

Stable and unstable manifolds for quasilinear parabolic systems with fully nonlinear boundary conditions

We investigate quasilinear systems of parabolic partial differential equations with fully nonlinear boundary conditions on bounded or exterior domains in the setting of Sobolev–Slobodetskii spaces. We establish local wellposedness and study the time and space regularity of the solutions. Our main results concern the asymptotic behavior of the solutions in the vicinity of a hyperbolic equilibrium. In particular, the local stable and unstable manifolds are constructed. Dedicated to Giuseppe Da Prato on the occasion of his 70th birthday     

Dynamics of a thermoelastic von Kármán plate in a subsonic gas flow

We discuss the problem of non-linear oscillations of a clamped thermoelastic plate in a subsonic gas flow. The dynamics of the plate is described by von Kármán system in the presence of thermal effects. No mechanical damping is assumed. To describe the influence of the gas flow we apply the linearized theory of potential flows. Our main result states that each weak solution of the problem considered tends to the set of the stationary points of the problem. A similar problem was considered in [27], but with rotational inertia accounted for, i.e. with the additional term −αΔu_tt,α > 0, and the same result on stabilization was obtained. There was introduced the decomposition of the solution such that the one term tends to zero and the other is compact in special (“local energy”) topology. This decomposition enables us to prove the main result. But the case of rotational inertia neglected (α = 0) appears more difficult. Low a priori smoothness of u_t in the case α = 0 prevents us to construct such a decomposition. In order to prove additional smoothness of u_t we use analyticity of the corresponding thermoelastic semigroup proved in [25]. The isothermal variant of this problem with additional mechanical damping term −εΔu_t , ε > 0 was considered in [13] and stabilization to the set of stationary solutions to the problem was proved. The problem, considered in the present work can also be regarded as an extension of the result of [18] to the case when gas occupies an unbounded domain.     

Heat-kernels and maximalL p -L q -Estimates: The non-autonomous case

In this paper, we establish maximal L^p−L^q estimates for non-autonomous parabolic equations of the type u′(t)+A(t)u(t)=f(t), u(0)=0 under suitable conditions on the kernels of the semigroups generated by the operators −A(t), t∈[0,T]. We apply this result on semilinear problems of the form u′(t)+A(t)u(t)=f(t, u(t)), u(0)=0.     

Remarks on an overdetermined boundary value problem

We modify and extend proofs of Serrin’s symmetry result for overdetermined boundary value problems from the Laplace-operator to a general quasilinear operator and remove a strong ellipticity assumption in Philippin (Maximum principles and eigenvalue problems in partial differential equations (Knoxville, TN, 1987), Longman Sci. Tech., Pitman Res. Notes Math. Ser., Harlow, 175, pp. 34–48, 1988) and a growth assumption in Garofalo and Lewis (A symmetry result related to some overdetermined boundary value problems, Am. J. Math. 111, 9–33, 1989) on the diffusion coefficient A, as well as a starshapedness assumption on Ω in Fragalà et al. (Overdetermined boundary value problems with possibly degenerate ellipticity: a geometric approach. Math. Zeitschr. 254, 117–132, 2006).     

Operator Matrices as Generators of Cosine Operator Functions

We introduce an abstract setting that allows to discuss wave equations with time-dependent boundary conditions by means of operator matrices. We show that such problems are well-posed if and only if certain perturbations of the same problems with homogeneous, time-independent boundary conditions are well-posed. As applications we discuss two wave equations in L^p(0, 1) and in L²(Ω) equipped with dynamical and acoustic-like boundary conditions, respectively.     

Exterior nonlinear Neumann problem

We consider the solvability of the Neumann problem for equation (1.1) in exterior domains in both cases: subcritical and critical. We establish the existence of least energy solutions. In the subcritical case the coefficient b(x) is allowed to have a potential well whose steepness is controlled by a parameter λ > 0. We show that least energy solutions exhibit a tendency to concentrate to a solution of a nonlinear problem with mixed boundary value conditions.     

Decay rates at low and high frequencies for a plate equation with feedback concentrated in interior curves

In this paper we study the stabilization of plate vibrations by means of piezoelectric actuators. In this situation the geometric control condition of Bardos, Lebeau and Rauch [6] is not satisfied. We prove that we have exponential stability for the low frequencies but not for the high frequencies. We give an explicit decay rate for regular initial data at high frequencies while clarifying the behavior of the constant which intervenes in this estimation there function of the frequency of cut n. The method used is based on some trace regularity which reduces stability to some observability inequalities for the corresponding undamped problem. Moreover, we show numerically at low frequencies, that the optimal location of the actuator is the center of the domain Ω. Research supported by the RIP program of Oberwolfach Institut and by the Tunisian Ministry for Scientific Research and Technology (MRST) under Grant 02/UR/15-01. Research supported by the RIP program of Oberwolfach Institut. (Received: September 17, 2003; revised: February 26, 2004)     

Potential analysis for a class of diffusion equations: A Gaussian bounds approach

We axiomatically develop a potential analysis for a general class of hypoelliptic diffusion equations under the following basic assumptions: doubling condition and segment property for an underlying distance and Gaussian bounds of the fundamental solution. Our analysis is principally aimed to obtain regularity criteria and uniform boundary estimates for the Perron-Wiener solution to the Dirichlet problem. As an example of application, we also derive an exterior cone criterion of boundary regularity and scale-invariant Harnack inequality and Hölder estimate for an important class of operators in non-divergence form with Hölder continuous coefficients, modeled on Hörmander vector fields.     

Boundary feedback stabilization of a coupled parabolic–hyperbolic Stokes–Lamé PDE system

We consider a parabolic–hyperbolic coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs), which governs fluid–structure interactions, and which features a suitable boundary dissipation term at the interface between the two media. The coupled system consists of Stokes flow coupled to the Lamé system of dynamic elasticity, with the respective dynamics being coupled on a boundary interface, where dissipation is introduced. Such a system is semigroup well-posed on the natural finite energy space (Avalos and Triggiani in Discr Contin Dynam Sys, to appear). Here we prove that, moreover, such semigroup is uniformly (exponentially) stable in the corresponding operator norm, with no geometrical conditions imposed on the boundary interface. This result complements the strong stability properties of the undamped case (Avalos and Triggiani in Discr Contin Dynam Sys, to appear). R. Triggiani’s research was partially supported by National Science Foundation under grant DMS-0104305 and by the Army Research Office under grant DAAD19-02-1-0179.     

Thermoelastic contact interaction of bodies in the presence of surface thermophysical irregularities

We study the thermoelastic contact interaction (in the absence of friction) of half-spaces under conditions of planar deformation in the presence of thin surface thermophysical irregularities that are taken into account by means of generalized conditions of thermal contact with one another. The problem is reduced to solving a system of singular integrodifferential equations with respect to the jumps of temperature and heat flow on the boundary of a section. We analyze the influence of a nonuniform thermal resistance distributed periodically along the surface or localized in one region of it on the distribution of temperature and stresses in the bodies and on their boundary. Four figures.Translated fromMatematicheskie Metody i Fiziko-Mekhanicheskie Polya, Issue 27, 1988, pp. 23–28.