Blow-Up of Solutions for a System of Petrovsky Equations with an Indirect Linear Damping

In this paper, we consider a coupled system of Petrovsky equations in a bounded domain with clamped boundary conditions. Due to several physical considerations, a linear damping which is distributed everywhere in the domain under consideration appears only in the first equation whereas no damping term is applied to the second one (this is indirect damping). Many studies show that the solution of this kind of system has a polynomial rate of decay as time tends to infinity, but does not have exponential decay. For four different ranges of initial energy, we show here the blow-up of solutions and give the lifespan estimates by improving the method of Wu (Electron. J. Diff. Equ. 105, 1 (2009)) and Li et al. (Nonlin. Anal. 74, 1523 (2011)). From the applications point of view, our results may provide some qualitative analysis and intuition for the researchers in other fields such as engineering and mechanics when they study the concrete models of Petrovsky type.