## Faculty Publications, Department of Mathematics

#### Date of this Version

March 2006

The strong stability problem for a fluid-structure interactive partial differential equation (PDE) is considered. The PDE comprises a coupling of the linearized Stokes equations to the classical system of elasticity, with the coupling occurring on the boundary interface between the fluid and solid media. It is now known that this PDE may be modeled by a $C_{0}$-semigroup of contractions on an appropriate Hilbert space. However, because of the nature of the unbounded coupling between fluid and structure, the resolvent of the semigroup generator will \emph{not} be a compact operator. In consequence, the classical solution to the stability problem, by means of the Nagy-Foias decomposition, will not avail here. Moreover, it is not practicable to write down explicitly the resolvent of the fluid-structure generator; this situation thus makes it problematic to use the wellknown semigroup stability result of Arendt-Batty and Lyubich-Phong. Instead, our proof of strong stability for the fluid-structure PDE will depend on the appropriate usage of a recently derived abstract stability result of Y. Tomilov.