The Heavy Chain PDE: Rapid Stabilization by Backstepping

Abstract

We consider boundary stabilization of a heavy chain hanging from a moving trolley with no tip load. Because the tension vanishes at the free end, the wave speed vanishes there; in Riemann coordinates the model becomes a degenerate $2\times2$ hyperbolic system in which the coupling is singular and the free-end reflection is generated in the domain rather than by a boundary condition. We construct a Volterra backstepping transformation that maps this system to the same chain with uniform damping of an arbitrarily prescribed rate and an elastic restraint at the trolley, yielding exponential convergence of displacement, velocity, and strain to zero. The singular kernel equations are solved by selecting their bounded Frobenius branch at the free end, which replaces the missing boundary datum, and the four kernels are generated by a globally convergent power series. The transformation is boundedly invertible on the energy space, with inverse obtained by reversing the prescribed decay rate. The result extends the radial backstepping structure developed for parabolic equations on disks and balls to a degenerate hyperbolic system.