Backstepping Control of a Hyperbolic PDE System with Zero Characteristic Speed States

Abstract: While for coupled hyperbolic PDEs of first order there now exist numerous PDE backstepping designs, systems with zero speed, i.e., without convection but involving infinite-dimensional ODEs, which arise in many applications, from environmental engineering to lasers to manufacturing, have received virtually no attention. In this paper, we introduce single-input boundary feedback designs for a linear 1-D hyperbolic system with two counterconvecting PDEs and $n$ equations (infinite-dimensional ODEs) with zero characteristic speed. The inclusion of zero-speed states, which we refer to as {\em atachic}, may result in non-stabilizability of the plant. We give a verifiable condition for the model to be stabilizable and design a full-state backstepping controller which exponentially stabilizes the origin in the $\mathcal{L}^{2}$ sense. In particular, to employ the backstepping method in the presence of atachic states, we use an invertible Volterra transformation only for the PDEs with nonzero speeds, leaving the zero-speed equations unaltered in the target system input-to-state stable with respect to the decoupled and stable counterconvecting nonzero-speed equations. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control design.