Viscoelastic solids of exponential type. II. Free energies, stability and attractors

The asymptotic behavior for solutions of the semilinear motion equation of a linear viscoelastic solid of exponential type (VSET) is studied and the existence of a global attractor is proved. These results are obtained by means of a suitable class of quadratic free energies defined on the minimal state space and making use of semigroup techniques. This is the second part of a plan which was started in a previous paper [6] by the study of state-space representation, minimality and controllability for VSET.