New trends towards lower energy estimates and optimality for nonlinearly damped vibrating systems

We present an approach based on comparison principles for energy and interpolation properties to derive lower energy estimates for nonlinearly either locally damped or boundary damped vibrating systems. We show how the dissipation relation provides strong information on the asymptotic behavior of the energy of solutions. The geometrical situations are either one-dimensional, or radial two-dimensional or three-dimensional for annulus domains. We also consider the case of general domains, but in this case, for solutions with bounded velocities in time and space. In all these cases, the nonlinear damping function is assumed to have arbitrary (strictly sublinear) growth at the origin. We give results for strong solutions and stronger lower estimates for smoother solutions. The results are presented in two forms, either on the side of energy comparison principles, or through time-pointwise lower estimates. Under additional geometric assumptions, we give the resulting lower and upper estimates for four representative examples of damping functions. We further give a “weak” lower estimate (in the sense of a certain lim supt→∞) and an upper estimate of the velocity for smoother solutions in case of general damping functions and for radial, as well as multi-dimensional domains. We also discuss these estimates in the framework of optimality, which is not proved here, and indicate open problems raised by these results.