Numerical treatment of hemivariational inequalities in mechanics: Two methods based on the solution of convex subproblems (Q1904916)

Hemivariational inequalities arise in mechanics when one considers problems involving nonmonotone, possibly multivalued laws or boundary conditions. In this paper, two algorithms for the solution of hemivariational inequality problems are compared. The first method is based on ideas developed in the fields of quasidifferential and difference convex optimization and transforms the hemivariational inequality into a system of convex variational inequalities which leads to multilevel approximation problems. The second method transforms the problem into an iteratively defined sequence of variational inequalities which approximates the original problem by a sequence of monotone problems. Both methods lead to convex analysis problems. Theoretical convergence results for the above methods are obtained and verified by means of numerical examples. The two algorithms show comparable performance and give the same results for presented examples.