Uniform boundary stabilization of von Karman plates

The author considers the determination of feedback controls which act along the edge of a thin plate and whose purpose is to stabilize the motion of the plate uniformly in situations where the deviation of the plate from equilibrium is not necessarily small, and therefore, is not adequately modeled by linear plate theory. The analysis deals mainly with the classical von Karman plate model. It is shown that the physical assumptions usually associated with the von Karman model lead to a coupled system of three nonlinear second-order partial differential equations for the three components of the displacement vector. The von Karman model is then obtained by imposing an additional hypothesis which does not seem to be altogether reasonable from a physical standpoint. The uniform asymptotic stability of the von Karman model is then studied