A quasistatic frictional contact problem for viscoelastic materials with long memory

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to study a quasistatic frictional contact problem for viscoelastic materials with long-term memory. The contact boundary conditions are governed by Tresca’s law, involving a slip dependent coefficient of friction. We focus our attention on the weak solvability of the problem within the framework of variational inequalities. The existence of a solution is obtained under a smallness assumption on a normal stress prescribed on the contact surface and on the coefficient of friction. The proof is based on a time discretization method, compactness and lower semicontinuity arguments.