Global attractors for damped abstract nonlinear hyperbolic systems

This dissertation is concerned with the long time dynamics of a class of damped abstract hyperbolic systems that arise in the study of certain smart material structures, namely elastomers. The term smart material refers to a material capable of both sensing and responding actively to outside excitation. These properties make smart materials a prime canditate for actuation and sensing in next generation control systems. However, modeling and numerically simulating their behavior poses several difficulties. In this work we consider a model for elastomers developed by H.T. Banks, N.J. Lybeck, B.C. Munoz, L.C. Yanyo, formulate this model as an abstract evolution system, and study the long time behavior of its solutions. We remark that the question of existence and uniqueness of solutions for this class of systems is a challenging problem and was only recently solved by H.T. Banks, D.S. Gilliam and V.I. Shubov.

Concerning the long time dynamics of the problem, we first prove that the system generates a weak dynamical system, and possesses a weak global attractor. Our main result is the existence of a "strong" dynamical system which has a compact global attractor. With the help of a Lyapunov function we are able to characterize the structure of this attractor. We also give a theorem that guarantees the stability of the global attractor with respect to varying parameters in the system. Our last result concerns the uniform differentiability of the dynamical system.