Exponential stability of a thermoelastic system with free boundary conditions without mechanical dissipation

We show herein the uniform stability of a thermoelastic plate model with no added dissipative mechanism on the boundary (uniform stability of a thermoelastic plate with added boundary dissipation was shown in [J. LAGNESE, Boundary Stabilization of Twin Plates, SIAM Stud. Appl. Math. 10, SIAM, Philadelphia, PA, 1989], as was that of the analytic case-where rotational forces are neglected-in [Z. LIU and S. ZHENG, Quarterly Appl. Math., 55 (1997), pp. 551-564]). The proof is constructive in the sense that we make use of a multiplier with respect to the coupled system involved so as to generate a fortiori the desired estimates; this multiplier is of an operator theoretic nature, as opposed to the more standard differential quantities used for related work. Moreover, the particular choice of our multiplier becomes clear only after recasting the PDE model into an associated abstract evolution equation.