On the time decay of solutions in porous-elasticity with quasi-static microvoids

In this paper we investigate the temporal asymptotic behavior of the solutions of the one-dimensional porous-elasticity problem with porous dissipation when the motion of microvoids is assumed to be quasi-static. This question has been recently studied in the general dynamical case. Thus, the natural question is to know if the assumption of quasi-static motion for the microvoids implies significant differences in the behavior of the solutions from the results obtained in the general dynamical case. It is worth noting that this assumption involves a qualitative change in the system of equations to be analyzed because it arises from the combination of a parabolic equation with an hyperbolic one, rather different from the well-known system of the thermo-elastic problem. First, we study the coupling of elasticity with porosity and we show that if only porous dissipation is present, the decay of solutions is slow, but if viscoelasticity is added, then the solutions decay exponentially. After that, we introduce thermal effects in the system and we show that while temperature brings exponential stability to the solutions, microtemperature does not. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.