Analysis of a quasi-variational contact problem arising in thermoelasticity (Q2074913)

The authors consider a model accounting for a thermoforming process in presence of an implicit obstacle constraint. The free boundary problem model is the system of elliptic-parabolic partial differential equations written as: for \(i=1,2\), \(-\kappa _{i}\Delta \theta _{i}+c_{i}\theta _{i}=h_{i}+(-1)^{i}b_{i}(\theta _{1}-\theta _{2})\chi _{\{u=\Phi \}}\), \( -\Delta \Phi =\alpha (\theta _{1}-\theta _{2})\chi _{\{u=\Phi \}}+g\), \(u\leq \Phi \), \(A_{\theta }u\leq f\), \((A_{\theta }u-f)(u-\Phi )=0\), in \(\Omega \), a bounded Lipschitz domain in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), where \(\theta _{1}\) and \( \theta _{2}\) denote the temperatures of the membrane and the mould, \(h_{1}\) and \(h_{2}\) the heat sources, \(u\) and \(\Phi \) the displacements of the membrane and the mould, \(\kappa _{i}>0\), \(c_{i}>0\), \(f,g,h_{i}:\Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\), \(b_{i}\geq 0\), and \(\alpha >0\) given data, \(\chi _{\{u=\Phi \}}\) the characteristic function of the contact set, \(A_{\theta }u=-\nabla \cdot (a(\theta _{1})\nabla u)\), where \(a\in C^{0}(\mathbb{R})\) satisfies \(0<\lambda _{1}\leq a\leq \lambda _{2}\). The boundary conditions \( \partial _{n}\theta _{i}=0=\Phi =u\) are imposed on \(\partial \Omega \), \( \partial _{n}\) denoting the normal derivative at the boundary \(\partial \Omega \) of \(\Omega \). The authors introduce a variational formulation of the problem and the associated notion of weak solution. They prove the following existence result: if \(f,g,h_{1},h_{2}\in L^{2}(\Omega )\) and \( c_{0}=\min(c_{1}-\frac{(b_{2}-b_{1})^{+}}{4}\), \(c2-\frac{(b_{1}-b_{2})^{+}}{4} )>0\), the above problem has a weak solution \((\theta _{1},\theta _{2},u,\Phi )\in (H^{1}(\Omega )\cap H_{loc}^{2}(\Omega ))^{2}\times H_{0}^{1}(\Omega )\times (H_{0}^{1}(\Omega )\cap H_{loc}^{2}(\Omega ))\) with \(\chi \in 1-H(\Phi -u)\), \(H\)\ being the Heaviside function of \([0,1]\). The authors prove further regularity results on this weak solution under further regularity properties of the data. They define the notion of regular solution and prove the existence of a regular solution, under further hypotheses on the data, among which \(f+\nabla \cdot (a(\theta _{1})\nabla \Phi )>0\), a.e. in \(\Omega \). They prove an uniqueness result for regular solutions. For the proof, the authors introduce a regularized problem, they prove the existence of a solution to this regularized problem and uniform uniform estimates on this solution, which allow to pass to the limit. In the last part of the paper, the authors consider the evolutionary version of the previous elliptic problem. They prove an existence result, an uniqueness result and a continuity property for the solution. For the proof, they build a semi-discretized problem for which they prove an existence and uniqueness result.