A Novel Decay Rate for a Coupled System of Nonlinear Viscoelastic Wave Equations

The main goal of the present paper is to study the existence, uniqueness and behavior of a solution for a coupled system of nonlinear viscoelastic wave equations with the presence of weak and strong damping terms. Owing to the Faedo-Galerkin method combined with the contraction mapping theorem, we established a local existence in [ 0 , T ] . The local solution was made global in time by using appropriate a priori energy estimates. The key to obtaining a novel decay rate is the convexity of the function χ , under the special condition of the initial energy E ( 0 ) . The condition of the weights of weak and strong damping has a fundamental role in the proof. The existence of both three different damping mechanisms and strong nonlinear sources make the paper very interesting from a mathematics point of view, especially when it comes to unbounded spaces such as R n .