Mathematical study of an evolution problem describing the thermo- mechanical process in shape memory alloys (Q1175695)

A model of structural phase-transitions in solids presenting the shape memory phenomenon is considered. For such a model it is assumed that the free energy depends on temperature, macroscopic deformation, and on proportions of phases, but regularizing terms in the momentum balance equation and in the constitutive laws for the phase proportions are neglected. The suitable boundary and initial conditions problem is formulated for the system of differential equations describing the evolution of such a model in the one-dimensional case. A variational formulation of this problem is given, an existence and uniqueness theorem of the solution of this problem is proved by using the contraction mapping principle, and some results regarding continuous dependence on the data, stability, and regularity are pointed out.