Stability analysis of degenerately-damped oscillations

Presented here is a study of well-posedness and asymptotic stability of a "degenerately damped" PDE modeling a vibrating elastic string. The coefficient of the damping may vanish at small amplitudes thus weakening the effect of the dissipation. It is shown that the resulting dynamical system has strictly monotonically decreasing energy and uniformly decaying lower-order norms, however, is not uniformly stable on the associated finite-energy space. These theoretical findings were motivated by numerical simulations of this model using a finite element scheme and successive approximations. A description of the numerical approach and sample plots of energy decay are supplied. In addition, for certain initial data the solution can be determined in closed form up to a dissipative nonlinear ordinary differential equation. Such solutions can be used to assess the accuracy of the numerical examples.