Long-time behaviour of a thermomechanical model for adhesive contact (Q631292)

The authors consider a PDE system describing adhesive contact between a thermo-viscoelastic body and a rigid support. The phenomenon of adhesive contact is described in therms of phase transitions for a surface damage model. Thermal effects are described by entropy balance laws. The resulting system is nonlinear because of the presence of internal constrains on the physical variables and the coupling of equations written in a domain and on a contact surface. Using a double approximation procedure, the authors prove the existence of solutions on the positive semi-axis. Also, it is proved that the trajectories admit cluster points which fulfil the stationary problem associated with the evolutionary system.