Existence results for a coupled viscoplastic-damage model in thermoviscoelasticity (Q2360467)

This paper presents a mathematical model describing two phenomena related to inelastic behaviour in materials, namely viscoplasticity and damage in thermoviscoelasticity. The corresponding PDE system consists of the heat equation, the flow rules for the plastic tensor and for the damage, the momentum balance and the kinematic admissibility condition. The associated initial-boundary value problem has weak energy solutions and entropic solutions, which are a considerably weaker concept. Existence of these two types of weak solutions is proven by passing to the limit in a time discretization scheme. Uniqueness of weak energy solutions is proven by a continuous dependence estimate in the case of a prescribed temperature profile and with a plastic dissipation potential independent of the state variables.