Theoretical and numerical decay results of a viscoelastic suspension bridge with variable exponents nonlinearity

Strong vibrations can cause considerable damage to structures and break materials apart. The main reason for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was the sudden transition from longitudinal to torsional oscillations caused by a resonance phenomenon. There exists evidence that several other bridges collapsed for the same reason. To overcome unwanted vibrations and prevent structures from resonating during earthquakes and winds, features and modifications such as dampers are used to stabilize these bridges. In this work, we study a nonlinear viscoelastic plate equation with variable exponents, which models the deformation of a suspension bridge. First, we establish explicit and general decay results of the system depending on the decay rate of the relaxation function and the nature of the variable-exponents nonlinearity. Then, we perform several numerical tests to illustrate our theoretical decay results. Our results extend and generalize many earlier works in the literature.