Complete-damage evolution based on energies and stresses (Q631298)

The purpose of the paper is to study a rate-independent damage model. The material fills in a bounded and Lipschitz domain \(\Omega \) of \(\mathbb{R}^{d} \). The state of the system is described by its displacement \(\widetilde{u}\) and by the scalar damage variable \(z\), which lies between 0 (totally damaged) and 1 (no damage). The author considers the stored energy functional \(\mathcal{E}(t,u,z)=\int_{\Omega }W(x,\mathbf{e}_{D}(t,x)+\mathbf{ e}(u)(x),z(x))dx+\mathcal{G}(z)\), with \(\mathcal{G}(z)=\int_{\Omega }b(x,z(x)+G(x,\nabla z(x))dx\). Here \(\widetilde{u}(t)=u_{D}(t)+u(t)\) where \(u \) vanishes on a fixed part \(\Gamma _{D}\) of the boundary of \(\Omega \), \( \mathbf{e}(u)\) is the linearized strain tensor, \(\mathbf{e}_{D}(u)=\mathbf{e} (u_{D})\), \(W\), \(b\) and \(G\) are Caratheodory functions which satisfy smoothness and growth conditions, among other hypotheses. In order to get a coercivity property, the function \(W\) is replaced by \(W_{\delta }\) with \( W_{\delta }(x,e,z)=W(x,e,z)+\delta |e|^{p}\), for a positive \(\delta \). The author first defines an appropriate notion of energetic solution for this regularized problem. The first main result of the paper proves an existence and uniqueness result, the energetic solution \((u_{\delta },z_{\delta })\) lying in the space \(L^{\infty }([0,T],W^{1,p}(\Omega ,\mathbb{R}^{d})\times W^{1,r}(\Omega ))\), with \(z\in BV([0,T],L^{1}(\Omega ))\). The main goal of the paper is the describe the asymptotic behaviour of \((u_{\delta },z_{\delta })\) when \(\delta \) goes to 0. The author here uses a parametrized \(\Gamma \)-convergence tool. The paper ends with the description of some examples and of some possible extensions.