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Variational-hemivariational inequalities: A brief survey on mathematical theory and numerical analysis
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Variational-hemivariational inequalities: A brief survey on mathematical theory and numerical analysis

Weimin Han
ArXiv.org
Cornell University
12/11/2025
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2512.10204
url
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2512.10204View
Preprint (Author's original)This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

Abstract

Variational-hemivariational inequalities are an area full of interesting and challenging mathematical problems. The area can be viewed as a natural extension of that of variational inequalities. Variational-hemivariational inequalities are valuable for application problems from physical sciences and engineering that involve non-smooth and even set-valued relations, monotone or non-monotone, among physical quantities. In the recent years, there has been substantial growth of research interest in modeling, well-posedness analysis, development of numerical methods and numerical algorithms of variational-hemivariational inequalities. This survey paper is devoted to a brief account of well-posedness and numerical analysis results for variational-hemivariational inequalities. The theoretical results are presented for a family of abstract stationary variational-hemivariational inequalities and the main idea is explained for an accessible proof of existence and uniqueness. To better appreciate the distinguished feature of variational-hemivariational inequalities, for comparison, three mechanical problems are introduced leading to a variational equation, a variational inequality, and a variational-hemivariational inequality, respectively. The paper also comments on mixed variational-hemivariational inequalities, with examples from applications in fluid mechanics, and on results concerning the numerical solution of other types (nonstationary, history dependent) of variational-hemivariational inequalities.
Computer Science - Numerical Analysis Mathematics - Numerical Analysis

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