A frictionless contact problem for viscoelastic materials

Abstract

We consider a mathematical model which describes the contact between a deformable body and an obstacle, the so‐called foundation. The body is assumed to have a viscoelastic behavior that we model with the Kelvin‐Voigt constitutive law. The contact is frictionless and is modeled with the well‐known Signorini condition in a form with a zero gap function. We present two alternative yet equivalent weak formulations of the problem and establish existence and uniqueness results for both formulations. The proofs are based on a general result on evolution equations with maximal monotone operators. We then study a semi‐discrete numerical scheme for the problem, in terms of displacements. The numerical scheme has a unique solution. We show the convergence of the scheme under the basic solution regularity. Under appropriate regularity assumptions on the solution, we also provide optimal order error estimates.