Existence of global weak solutions for a class of quasilinear hyperbolic integro-differential equations describing visco-elastic materials (Q1337553)

We consider the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem associated with the quasilinear hyperbolic integro-differential system \[ u_{tt} = \text{div} \sigma^ I (\nabla u) + \text{div} \sigma^ m (\nabla u) + f. \] We prove the existence of a global weak solution for arbitrarily large data. The main novelty in the problem is that \(\text{div} \sigma^ I (\nabla u)\) is not assumed to be globally Lipschitz. This is the source of fundamental technical difficulties. A new and subtle modification of the Galerkin- Fadeo method is introduced along with some new functional analysis results.