Homogenization of nonlinear visco-elastic composites (Q924916)

The paper presents an homogenization result for nonlinear viscoelastic materials. The constitutive equation for a basic material is taken as \(\sigma -B(x):\partial \varepsilon /\partial t\in \beta (\varepsilon ,x)\) , where \(\sigma \) (resp. \(\varepsilon \)) is the stress (resp. the linearized strain) tensor, \(B(x)\) is a positive definite fourth-order viscosity tensor and \(\beta \) is maximal monotone mapping in the space of second-order tensors. The problem is posed in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\), where \(\Omega \) is a smooth domain of \(\mathbb{R}^{3}\). The author adds the quasi-static balance equation \(-\nabla \cdot \sigma =\overrightarrow{f}\) in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\). The author builds analogical discrete or continuous models considering stress fields independent of the elements building the overall model and strain fields obtained as the sum or the integral of the stress fields. After a long presentation of the main tools he will use throughout the work, the author introduces a weak formulation of the first problem under consideration and proves an existence and uniqueness result. This is obtained using a time discretization procedure and some Korn inequality in order to establish estimates which allow to pass to the limit with respect to the time step. In a further section, the author moves to the composite situation. This construction leads to a constitutive equation which depends on a highly oscillating parameter \(y\). The author here first uses the two-scale convergence in order to describe the asymptotic behavior of the solution of the corresponding weak formulation. Then he proves that a single-scale homogenization may be applied, after the elimination of the variable \(y\) through an integration on the unit cell \((0,1)^{3}\). He then compares the two convergence results, and also these convergence results to the analogical models. In the last part of the paper, the author applies some \(\Gamma \)-convergence methods to the original problem, introducing an appropriate energy functional.