Solvability for a class of generalized standard materials with thermomechanical coupling (Q1926411)

The purpose of the paper is to prove the existence of a weak solution to a system of evolution equations which describe the behaviour of some generalized standard materials. The material fills in a domain \(\Omega \) of \(\mathbb{R}^{3}\) with smooth boundary \(\partial \Omega \in C^{2+\rho }\), with \(\rho >0\). The authors introduce the Helmholtz free energy \( W(\varepsilon ,z,\theta)\) where \(\varepsilon \) is the linearized strain tensor, \(z\) is an internal variable and \(\theta \) is the temperature of the material. They assume that this free energy can be written as \(W(\varepsilon ,z,\theta )=W^{mech}(\varepsilon ,z)-W^{\theta }(\theta )+\theta W^{coup}(\varepsilon ,z)\) with further expressions of these functionals, thus assuming that the entropy separates the thermal and the mechanical variables inside the material. They write the momentum equilibrium equation \( -\text{div}(\sigma ^{el}+A\overset{.}{\varepsilon })=f\), \(\partial \psi ( \overset{.}{z})+B\overset{.}{z}+\sigma ^{inel}\ni 0\), where \(f\) is a given loading, \(\sigma ^{el}=\partial _{\varepsilon }W(\varepsilon ,z,\theta )\), \( \sigma ^{inel}=\partial _{z}W(\varepsilon ,z,\theta )\), \(A\) and \(B\) are viscosity tensors and \(\psi \) is the dissipation potential. The authors also write the entropy equation \(\theta \overset{.}{s}-\text{div}(\kappa \nabla \theta )=A\overset{.}{\varepsilon}:\overset{.}{\varepsilon }+B\overset{.}{z} :\overset{.}{z}+\psi (\overset{.}{z})\), where \(\kappa \) is the heat conductivity. The authors add initial conditions for \(u\), \(z\) and \(\theta \). Boundary conditions of Dirichlet or Neumann type are imposed \(u=0\), \( \alpha \nabla z\cdot n=0\) and \(\kappa \nabla \theta \cdot n=0\) are imposed on \(\partial \Omega \times [ 0,\tau )\). The authors impose different hypotheses on the data of the problem which lead to the existence of a weak solution \((u,z,\theta )\) in Sobolev spaces. For the proof of this existence result, the authors use a fixed point argument. They indeed build an operator \(\Phi _{\tau }^{\widetilde{\theta },\theta }\) from \(C^{0}([0,\tau ];L^{4}(\Omega ))\) into itself which associates to every \(\widetilde{\theta }\) of this space the solution of \(c\overset{.}{\theta }-\text{div}(\kappa \nabla \theta )=f\widetilde{\theta}\) with the initial condition \(\theta (.,0)=\theta ^{0}\) in \(\Omega \) and the Neumann boundary condition \(\kappa \nabla \theta \cdot n=0\) imposed on \(\partial \Omega \times [ 0,\tau)\). They prove that \(\Phi _{\tau }^{\widetilde{\theta },\theta }\) satisfies the assumptions of Schauder's fixed point for some positive \(\tau \) . This is done using Galerkin's method, and Korn's and Young's inequalities, applied to a variational formulation of the preceding evolution equation. The authors also prove that the solution of the original problem is thermodynamically admissible, that is \(\theta >0\) for almost \((x,t)\in \Omega \times [ 0,\tau )\). They also prove uniform estimates on this solution with respect to the time variable, under further hypotheses on the initial data. They conclude the paper giving two examples of materials whose constitutive equation may be associated to their study: the visco-elasto-plastic materials and some shape memory alloys.