Eliminating flutter for clamped von Karman plates immersed in subsonic flows

We address the long-time behavior of a non-rotational von Karman plate in an inviscid potential flow. The model arises in aeroelasticity and models the interaction between a thin, nonlinear panel and a flow of gas in which it is immersed [6, 21, 23]. Recent results in [16, 18] show that the plate component of the dynamics (in the presence of a physical plate nonlinearity) converge to a global compact attracting set of finite dimension; these results were obtained in the absence of mechanical damping of any type. Here we show that, by incorporating mechanical damping the full flow-plate system, full trajectories---both plate and flow---converge strongly to (the set of) stationary states. Weak convergence results require "minimal" interior damping, and strong convergence of the dynamics are shown with sufficiently large damping. We require the existence of a "good" energy balance equation, which is only available when the flows are subsonic. Our proof is based on first showing the convergence properties for regular solutions, which in turn requires propagation of initial regularity on the infinite horizon. Then, we utilize the exponential decay of the difference of two plate trajectories to show that full flow-plate trajectories are uniform-in-time Hadamard continuous. This allows us to pass convergence properties of smooth initial data to finite energy type initial data. Physically, our results imply that flutter (a non-static end behavior) does not occur in subsonic dynamics. While such results were known for rotational (compact/regular) plate dynamics [14] (and references therein), the result presented herein is the first such result obtained for non-regularized---the most physically relevant---models

Flow-plate interactions: Well-posedness and long-time behavior

We consider flow-structure interactions modeled by a modified wave equation coupled at an interface with equations of nonlinear elasticity. Both subsonic and supersonic flow velocities are treated with Neumann type flow conditions, and a novel treatment of the so called Kutta-Joukowsky flow conditions are given in the subsonic case. The goal of the paper is threefold: (i) to provide an accurate review of recent results on existence, uniqueness, and stability of weak solutions, (ii) to present a construction of finite dimensional, attracting sets corresponding to the structural dynamics and discuss convergence of trajectories, and (iii) to state several open questions associated with the topic. This second task is based on a decoupling technique which reduces the analysis of the full flow-structure system to a PDE system with delay.Comment: 1 figure. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1208.5245, arXiv:1311.124

Semigroup Well-posedness of A Linearized, Compressible Fluid with An Elastic Boundary

We address semigroup well-posedness of the fluid-structure interaction of a linearized compressible, viscous fluid and an elastic plate (in the absence of rotational inertia). Unlike existing work in the literature, we linearize the compressible Navier-Stokes equations about an arbitrary state (assuming the fluid is barotropic), and so the fluid PDE component of the interaction will generally include a nontrivial ambient flow profile $\mathbf{U}$. The appearance of this term introduces new challenges at the level of the stationary problem. In addition, the boundary of the fluid domain is unavoidably Lipschitz, and so the well-posedness argument takes into account the technical issues associated with obtaining necessary boundary trace and elliptic regularity estimates. Much of the previous work on flow-plate models was done via Galerkin-type constructions after obtaining good a priori estimates on solutions (specifically \cite {Chu2013-comp}---the work most pertinent to ours here); in contrast, we adopt here a Lumer-Phillips approach, with a view of associating solutions of the fluid-structure dynamics with a $C_{0}$-semigroup $\left\{ e^{ \mathcal{A}t}\right\} _{t\geq 0}$ on the natural finite energy space of initial data. So, given this approach, the major challenge in our work becomes establishing of the maximality of the operator $\mathcal{A}$ which models the fluid-structure dynamics. In sum: our main result is semigroup well-posedness for the fully coupled fluid-structure dynamics, under the assumption that the ambient flow field $\mathbf{U}\in \mathbf{H}^{3}(\mathcal{O})$ has zero normal component trace on the boundary (a standard assumption with respect to the literature). In the final sections we address well-posedness of the system in the presence of the von Karman plate nonlinearity, as well as the stationary problem associated with the dynamics.Comment: 1 figur