ON THE ENERGY DECAY OF TWO COUPLED STRINGS THROUGH A JOINT DAMPER

Abstract The stabilization of two coupled strings with fixed boundaries attached to a linear damper at their joint of connection is studied. The transformation used in a previous approach to convert the second order hyperbolic equations into a first order system results in a loss of equivalence. It is shown that when the ratio of the wave speeds of the two strings is an irrational number, the system is asymptotically, but not exponentially, stable. The method is applied to the other cases with different joint and boundary conditions.