Existence of a solution to a dynamic unilateral contact problem for a cracked viscoelastic body. (Q1426651)

The authors study the dynamic unilateral contact problem with friction for a cracked viscoelastic body. The viscoelastic model is characterized by Kelvin-Voigt law. Here a nonlocal friction law is investigated. A classical and variational formulations of the problem are given, then a variational formulation of a penalized problem is considered. Furthermore, an equivalent formulation using a domain decomposition is presented for the penalized problem. The main result: The existence result obtained by the authors in a recently published papers [in Wirgin, Armand (ed.), Acoustics, mechanics, and the related topics of mathematical analysis. Proceedings of the international conference to celebrate Robert P. Gilbert's 70th birthday, Frejus, France, June 12--22, 116--122 (2002; Zbl 1053.74584)], for a dynamic unilateral contact problem with nonlocal friction, without any additional assumption on velocity or acceleration is extended to a cracked viscoelastic body. Several significant estimates are derived which allow to pass to the limit by using compactness arguments.