Revisiting the Direct Fourier Filtering Technique for the Maximal Decay Rate of Boundary-damped Wave Equation by Finite Differences and Finite Elements

Abstract: The one-dimensional PDE model of the wave equation with a state feedback controller at its boundary, which describes wave dynamics of a wide-range of controlled mechanical systems, has exponentially stable solutions. However, it is known that the reduced models of the wave equation by the standard Finite Differences and Finite Elements suffer from the lack of exponential stability (and exact observability without a state feedback controller) uniformly as the discretization parameter tends to zero. This is due to the loss of uniform gap among the high-frequency eigenvalues as the discretization parameter tends to zero. One common remedy to overcome this discrepancy is the direct Fourier filtering of the reduced models, where the high-frequency spurious eigenvalues are filtered out. After filtering, besides from the strong convergency, the exponential decay rate, mimicking the one for the partial differential equation counterpart, can be retained uniformly. However, the existing results in the literature are solely based on an observability inequality of the control-free model, to which the filtering is implemented. Moreover, the decay rate as a function of the filtering parameter is implicit. In this paper, exponential stability results for both filtered Finite Difference and Finite Element reduced models are established directly by a Lyapunov-based approach and a thorough eigenvalue estimation.The maximal decay rate is explicitly provided as a function of the feedback gain and filtering parameter. Our results, expectedly, mimic the ones of the PDE counterpart uniformly as the discretization parameter tends to zero. Several numerical tests are provided to support our results.