Analysis of Quasistatic Frictional Contact Problem with Subdifferential Form, Unilateral Condition and Long-Term Memory

Abstract

We consider a quasistatic problem which models the contact between a deformable body and an obstacle called foundation. The material is assumed to have a viscoelastic behavior that we model with a constitutive law with long-term memory, thus at each moment of time, the stress tensor depends not only on the present strain tensor, but also on its whole history. In Contact Mechanics, history-dependent operators could arise both in the constitutive law of the material and in the frictional contact conditions. The mathematical analysis of contact models leads to the study of variational and hemivariational inequalities. For this reason a large number of contact problems lead to inequalities which involve history dependent operators, called history dependent inequalities. Such inequalities could be variational or hemivariational and variational hemivariational.In this paper we derive a weak formulation of the problem and, under appropriate regularity hypotheses, we stablish an existence and uniqueness result. The proof of the result is based on arguments of variational inequalities monotone operators and Banach fixed point theorem.