A unilateral constraint contact problem for viscoelastic materials with wear

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate a mathematical model that describes the frictional contact between viscoelastic materials with a long memory and a moving foundation. The contact condition is modeled with a version of normal compliance condition with unilateral constraint in which wear of foundation is considered. Friction contact condition follows a sliding version of Coulomb's law of dry friction. We derive a variational formulation of the problem, which couples a variational inequality and an integral equation. Then, we obtain the unique weak solvability of the contact problem by virtue of a fixed point theorem. By using the penalization method, we discuss the convergence of the contact problem. Further, we obtain the unique solution of the penalized problem and this solution converges to the solution of the original contact model as the penalization parameter converges to zero.