Stability of Timoshenko systems with past history

We consider vibrating systems of Timoshenko type with past history acting only in one equation. We show that the dissipation given by the history term is strong enough to produce exponential stability if and only if the equations have the same wave speeds. Otherwise the corresponding system does not decay exponentially as time goes to infinity. In the case that the wave speeds of the equations are different, which is more realistic from the physical point of view, we show that the solution decays polynomially to zero, with rates that can be improved depending on the regularity of the initial data. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.