Energy decay estimates for the damped plate equation with a local degenerated dissipation

We consider the Euler–Bernoulli plate equation in a bounded open set Ω of R2 with a degenerated local damping term. This dissipation is effective in a subset ω of Ω and the damping coefficient may vanish in some subset of dimension one of ω. We show that the usual observability inequality for the undamped problem implies polynomial decay estimates for the damped problem. Our method can be applied for other PDE's such as the wave equation or the Schrodinger equation.