A frictionless contact problem for viscoelastic materials

We consider a mathematical model which describes the contact between a deformable body and an obstacle, the so-called foundation. The body is assumed to have a viscoelastic behavior that we model with the Kelvin-Voigt constitutive law. The contact is frictionless and is modeled with the well-known...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mikäel Barboteu, Weimin Han, Mircea Sofonea
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2002-01-01
Series:Journal of Applied Mathematics
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/S1110757X02000219
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Summary:We consider a mathematical model which describes the contact between a deformable body and an obstacle, the so-called foundation. The body is assumed to have a viscoelastic behavior that we model with the Kelvin-Voigt constitutive law. The contact is frictionless and is modeled with the well-known Signorini condition in a form with a zero gap function. We present two alternative yet equivalent weak formulations of the problem and establish existence and uniqueness results for both formulations. The proofs are based on a general result on evolution equations with maximal monotone operators. We then study a semi-discrete numerical scheme for the problem, in terms of displacements. The numerical scheme has a unique solution. We show the convergence of the scheme under the basic solution regularity. Under appropriate regularity assumptions on the solution, we also provide optimal order error estimates.
ISSN:1110-757X
1687-0042