Analysis of a dynamic unilateral contact problem for a cracked viscoelastic body (Q2491936)

In the previous article [\textit{M. Cocou}, Z. Angew. Math. Phys. 53, 1099--1109 (2002; Zbl 1018.35074)] an existence result was obtained for a dynamic unilateral contact problem with nonlocal friction, for viscoelastic bodies of Kelvin-Voigt type, without any additional assumption on velocity or acceleration. Here a similar technique is used to obtain an existence result for a cracked viscoelastic body. At first a parametrization of the crack is defined, classical and variational formulations of the problem are given, and an equivalent formulation for the usage of a decomposition of the domain is presented. Further for the variational formulation of a penalized problem by an incremental technique the existence and uniqueness of the solution are proved. Then several estimates on the penalized solutions are obtained allowing to prove the existence of a solution to the unilateral contact problem by using the decomposition of the domain and compactness arguments.