Boundary stabilization of a moving interface in a 2 x 2 weakly hyperbolic system of balance laws: application to continuous sedimentation

Abstract

We design a boundary feedback for the level of the sediment bed of a continuous settler and prove that it exponentially stabilizes the linearized closed loop under a small-gain condition. The unit is modeled by a 2 x 2 system of balance laws in which the bed surface, the interface, is not a smooth part of the solution but a moving shock between a weakly hyperbolic free-settling zone and a strictly hyperbolic compression zone. We describe it by the Rankine-Hugoniot relations and map the problem onto a fixed domain. Moreover, we prove local well-posedness with a continuation criterion given by a single margin function. Then we linearize the system near an equilibrium. The linearization couples a dissipative distributed layer to one scalar, the interface position, whose equation does not contain the control. We solve this by infinitedimensional forwarding: a Sylvester kernel cancels the interface trace and isolates the interface pole, and a proportional feedback then sets its decay rate. Every hypothesis is verified on an illustrative example, a laboratory-scale continuous settler containing a bed of compact polystyrene beads.