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A frictionless contact problem for viscoelastic materials
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

A frictionless contact problem for viscoelastic materials

Mikäel Barboteu, Mircea Sofonea and Weimin Han
Journal of Applied Mathematics, Vol.2(1), pp.1-21
2002
DOI: 10.1155/S1110757X02000219
url
https://doi.org/10.1155/S1110757X02000219View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

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.

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