Continuity of Global Attractors under a Mass-Preserving Singular Memory Limit, with an Application to a Coupled Suspension Bridge System

Abstract

We study how the global attractor of a dissipative evolution equation with memory depends on the memory kernel when the kernel concentrates, while preserving its total mass, towards a Dirac mass at the origin. The mass-preserving rescaling is the structural feature that prevents the effective elastic coefficients from degenerating in the limit, so that the memory-dependent dynamics reduces formally to a memoryless damped system with unchanged elastic coefficients. For a coupled nonlinear suspension bridge system with past history, taken as a concrete model, we establish uniform-in-parameter dissipativity and uniform-in-parameter exponential stability of the associated linear semigroup. These uniform estimates yield uniform quasi-stability, uniform exponential attraction, finite-time convergence of the semigroups, and uniform Hölder continuity with respect to the perturbation parameter. We deduce upper semicontinuity of the global attractors, and, under an additional structural stability hypothesis on the limit attractor, lower semicontinuity as well. The analysis separates the general continuity mechanism, which applies to a broad class of memory kernels and dissipative systems, from the model-specific verification, which exploits the coupled bridge structure.