A unified approach via convexity for optimal energy decay rates of finite and infinite dimensional vibrating damped systems with applications to semi-discretized vibrating damped systems

The Liapunov method is celebrated for its strength to establish strong decay of solutions of damped equations. Extensions to infinite dimensional settings have been studied by several authors (see e.g. Haraux, 1991 [11], and Komornik and Zuazua, 1990 [17] and references therein). Results on optimal energy decay rates under general conditions of the feedback is far from being complete. The purpose of this paper is to show that general dissipative vibrating systems have structural properties due to dissipation. We present a general approach based on convexity arguments to establish sharp optimal or quasi-optimal upper energy decay rates for these systems, and on comparison principles based on the dissipation property, and interpolation inequalities (in the infinite dimensional case) for lower bounds of the energy. We stress the fact that this method works for finite as well as infinite dimensional vibrating systems and as well as for applications to semi-discretized nonlinear damped vibrating PDE's. A part of this approach has been introduced in Alabau-Boussouira (2004, 2005) [1] and [2]. In the present paper, we identify a new, simple and explicit criteria to select a class of nonlinear feedbacks, for which we prove a simplified explicit energy decay formula comparatively to the more general but also more complex formula we give in Alabau-Boussouira (2004, 2005) [1] and [2]. Moreover, we prove optimality of the decay rates for this class, in the finite dimensional case. This class includes a wide range of feedbacks, ranging from very weak nonlinear dissipation (exponentially decaying in a neighborhood of zero), to polynomial, or polynomial-logarithmic decaying feedbacks at the origin. In the infinite dimensional case, we establish a comparison principle on the energy of sufficiently smooth solutions through the dissipation relation. This principle relies on suitable interpolation inequalities. It allows us to give lower bounds for the energy of smooth initial data for the one-dimensional wave equation with a distributed polynomial damping, which improves Haraux (1995) [12] lower estimate of the energy for this case. We also establish lower bounds in the multi-dimensional case for sufficiently smooth solutions when such solutions exist. We further mention applications of these various results to several classes of PDE's, namely: the locally and boundary damped multi-dimensional wave equation, the locally damped plate equation and the globally damped coupled Timoshenko beams system but it applies to several other examples. Furthermore, we show that these optimal energy decay results apply to finite dimensional systems obtained from spatial discretization of infinite dimensional damped systems. We illustrate these results on the one-dimensional locally damped wave and plate equations discretized by finite differences and give the optimal energy decay rates for these two examples. These optimal rates are not uniform with respect to the discretization parameter. We also discuss and explain why optimality results have to be stated differently for feedbacks close to linear behavior at the origin.