Quasistatic crack growth in finite elasticity with Lipschitz data (Q628615)

First, the author introduces the hypotheses on the geometry of the body, on the strain energy, on the external forces and on the prescribed deformations. Then, it is presented the multiplicative splitting method. By means of this method it is possible to pass to an auxiliary problem with time-independent prescribed deformations and time-dependent bulk energy. The main part of the paper is dedicated to the study of quasistatic evolutions, that means, motions which at each time minimize the total energy and satisfy an energy-dissipation balance law. Using the definition of incremental approximable quasistatic evolution, the author presents the existence result and the properties of global stability and global energy balance.