Complete damage in linear elastic materials: modeling, weak formulation and existence results (Q493177)

The focus of the present paper is to introduce and analyze a complete damage model for linear elastic materials which are in quasi-static equilibrium. Starting with the incomplete damage model and regularizing it in the equation of balance forces, the authors show how the known existence results can be applied to achieve the goal of the paper. The most important idea pursued in the paper comprises formulating the PDE system on a time-dependent domain. This part of the domain consists of all the not-completely damaged path connected components of the material which can be connected to Dirichlet boundary and has the damage evolution driven by a differential inclusion. The other part of the domain contains completely damaged material and not-completely damaged parts that can be isolated from the Dirichlet boundary. The ways to handle the difficulties, namely, the energy (jump) inequality and the failure of Korn's inequality for the time-dependent domain that might have bad smoothness properties, are clearly indicated. Starting with the explanation of notations, the authors present their model first in a classical setting and sufficient smoothness properties, and then, adopting a rigorous mathematical framework, the authors prove their main result, which is not only new or novel, but quite interesting. The proof is quite mathematical and involves numerous definitions, lemmas, theorems, and appendices.