EXPONENTIAL DECAY FOR A VISCOELASTICALLY DAMPED TIMOSHENKO BEAM

Of concern is a viscoelastic beam modelled using the Timoshenko theory. It is well-known that the system is exponentially stable if the kernel in the memory term is sub-exponential. That is, if the product of the kernel with an exponential function is a summable function. In this article we address the questions: What if the kernel is tested against a different function (say Gamma) other than the exponential function? Would there still be stability? In the affirmative, what kind of decay rate we get? It is proved that for a non- decreasing function whose logarithmic derivative is decreasing to zero we have a decay of order Gamma to some power and in the case it decreases to a different value than zero then the decay is exponential.