Exponential Stability of the Linear Semigroup and the Global Attractor for a Coupled Suspension Bridge System with Past History

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the long-time dynamics of a coupled nonlinear suspension bridge system with past history, in which the deck and the main cable interact through the nonlinear restoring force \(k[u-v]^{+}\). Building on the well-posedness and the solution semigroup established in \cite{Mukiawa2025}, we first show the exponential stability of the associated linear semigroup by means of the Gearhart--Prüss theorem together with a detailed resolvent estimate. We then combine this exponential stability with the local Lipschitz property of the nonlinearity, the fact that the nonlinearity acts only on the elastic component, the smoothing of the elastic component, and the exponential decay of the memory kernels to conclude that the solution semigroup is quasi-stable in the sense of Chueshov--Lasiecka, and therefore asymptotically smooth. Together with the dissipativity recalled from \cite{Mukiawa2025}, this leads to a compact global attractor in the natural energy space. In particular, our approach may be viewed as closing a gap in the proof of asymptotic smoothness in \cite{Mukiawa2025}, where a non-decaying initial-difference term was absorbed into an arbitrarily small constant without justification.