In this paper, we consider the Bresse‐Cattaneo system with a frictional damping term and prove some optimal decay results for the L2‐norm of the solution and its higher order derivatives. In fact, we show that there is a completely new stability number δ that controls the decay rate of the solution. To prove our results, we use the energy method in the Fourier space to build some very delicate Lyapunov functionals that give the desired results. We also prove the optimality of the results by using the eigenvalues expansion method. In addition, we show that for the absence of the frictional damping term, the solution of our problem does not decay at all. This result improves some early results

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