In this article, we study the null controllability of a linear system coming from a population dynamics model with age structuring and spatial diffusion (of Lotka-McKendrick type). The control is localized in the space variable as well as with respect to the age. The first novelty we bring in is that the age interval in which the control needs to be active can be arbitrarily small and does not need to contain a neighbourhood of 0. The second one is that we prove that the whole population can be steered into zero in a uniform time, without, as in the existing literature, excluding some interval of low ages. Moreover, we improve the existing estimates of the controllability time and we show that our estimates are sharp, at least when the control is active for very low ages. Finally, we show that the system can be steered between two positive steady states by controls preserving the positivity of the state trajectory. The method of proof, combining final-state observability estimates with the use of characteristics and with L ∞ estimates of the associated semigroup, avoids the explicit use of parabolic Carleman estimates.

We study the interaction of surface water waves with a floating solid constraint to move only in the vertical direction. The first novelty we bring in is that we propose a new model for this interaction, taking into consideration the viscosity of the fluid. This is done supposing that the flow obeys a shallow water regime (modeled by the viscous Saint-Venant equations in one space dimension) and using a Hamiltonian formalism. Another contribution of this work is establishing the well-posedness of the obtained PDEs/ODEs system in function spaces similar to the standard ones for strong solutions of viscous shallow water equations. Our wellposedness results are local in time for every initial data and global in time if the initial data are close (in appropriate norms) to an equilibrium state. Moreover, we show that the linearization of our system around an equilibrium state can be described, at least for some initial data, by an integro-fractional differential equation related to the classical Cummins equation and which reduces to the Cummins equation when the viscosity vanishes and the fluid is supposed to fill the whole space. Finally, we describe some numerical tests, performed on the original nonlinear system, which illustrate the return to equilibrium and the influence of the viscosity coefficient.