Boundary control of long waves in nonlinear dispersive systems

Unidirectional propagation of long waves in nonlinear dispersive systems may be modeled by the Benjamin-Bona-Mahony-Burgers equation, a third order partial differential equation incorporating linear dissipative and dispersive terms, as well as a term covering nonlinear wave phenomena. For higher orders of the nonlinearity, the equation may have unstable solitary wave solutions. Although it is a one dimensional problem, achieving a global result for this equation is not trivial due to the nonlinearity and the mixed partial derivative. In this paper, two sets of nonlinear boundary control laws that achieve global exponential stability and semi-global exponential stability are derived for both linear and nonlinear cases.