Radial motions of viscoelastic shells (Q1080285)

The contribution considers the problem of radial motion of a thick spherical shell under constant pressure difference between the inner and outer surfaces and under zero body forces. The material is homogeneous, isotropic, viscoelastic, and incompressible. Thermal effects are ignored. Under these hypotheses the equation of motion reduces to an autonomous functional differential equation with infinite delay. The purpose of the article is to examine whether the presence in the differential equation of a mechanical dissipative mechanism that causes the energy to decay is sufficient to prevent finite time blow-up of the solution, ensuring global existence in time. A free energy functional \(\Psi\) (\({\mathcal F},{\mathcal F}_ t)\) is introduced obtained from \({\mathcal W}({\mathcal F})\) by adding a term which depends on the history \({\mathcal F}_{t}\) of \({\mathcal F}\) up to time \(t\). The examination yields, that the total energy of the body decreases with time. Under the given constitutive equations the equation of motion differs from that of the elastic problem in a term \(v(x_ t)\), depending on the history up to time t of the inner radius of the shell. There is a class of initial data for which the solution blow-up in finite time. To prove this, first is shown that the solution satisfies certain monotonicity properties. Using the concavity method it is proved that the solutions with initial data exist only on a finite interval of time depending on the initial data.