An application of the control by coefficients in a variational inequality for hydrodynamic lubrication (Q1586543)

This paper is concerned with an elastohydrodynamic problem involving the solution of a nonlinear elliptic equation, or, equivalently, a variational inequality in which the unknown is the pressure \(p\) and a coefficient \(h\) is a known function of the pressure with \(p\to h(p)\). Numerical procedures are usually based on the fixed point method \(p^n\to h(p^n)\to p^{n+1}\), though this approach is known to fail to converge for a large range of data even when multigrid methods are used. The method used in this paper inverts this procedure by using a two-step method. The first step can be considered to be an identification process, which is then treated as a control problem involving the coefficients of a variational state equation. A main feature of this approach is the nonlinear dependence of the relation control on the coefficients, and the appearance of the control in the right-hand side of the state equation.