One-sided contact problems with friction arising along the normal (Q311181)

The authors analyze a boundary contact problem with friction for a micropolar homogeneous elastic hemitropic material. They consider a bounded and simply connected domain \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{3}\) with \(C^{\infty } \) boundary and which is filled with a homogeneous hemitropic material. The authors first write the expressions of the force and momentum stress tensors \(\{\tau _{pq}\}\) and \(\{\mu _{pq}\}\) in terms of the displacement field and of the internal rotations. They write the equilibrium equations as \( \sum_{p=1}^{3}\partial _{p}\tau _{pq}+\rho F_{q}=0\), \(\sum_{p=1}^{3}\partial _{p}\mu _{pq}+\sum_{p=1}^{3}\varepsilon _{qlr}\tau _{lr}+\rho \Psi _{q}=0\), \( q=1,2,3\), where \(F\) is the mass force, \(\Psi \) the mass momentum, \(\rho \) the density and \(\varepsilon \) the Levi-Civita symbol. They gather these equilibrium equations in a matrix form \(L(\partial )U+\mathcal{G}=0\) in \( \Omega \) and they write a Green formula introducing a deformation energy which is proved to be positive definite under hypotheses on the coefficients. The first result proves an equivalence between the contact problem for such a material and a variational inequality. The main part of the paper proves an existence and uniqueness result for this contact problem, whose proof is based on the study of an auxiliary problem and classical convexity arguments. In the last part of their paper, the authors study a noncoercive case for which they prove the existence of a weak solution which is unique up to a rigid displacement.