Remarks on exponential stability for a coupled system of elasticity and thermoelasticity with second sound

Abstract

We study the large time behavior of solutions to a linear transmission problem in one space dimension. The problem at hand models a thermoelastic material with second sound confined by a purely elastic one. We shall characterize all equilibrium states of the considered system and prove that every solution approaches one designated equilibrium state with an exponential rate as time goes to infinity. Hereto, we apply methods from the theory of strongly continuous semigroups. In particular, we obtain uniform resolvent bounds for the underlying generator. This removes the largeness assumption of elastic wave speeds imposed in [Y.P. Meng and Y.G. Wang, Anal. Appl. (Singap.) 13 (2015)] for having an exponential energy decay rate when the problem only has the trivial equilibrium. In an appendix we provide a similar exponential stability result for the case where heat conduction is modeled using Fourier's law.