English

Abstract

We consider a quasistatic contact problem between a viscoelastic material with long-term memory and a foundation. The contact is modelled with a normal compliance condition, a version of Coulomb’s law of dry friction and a bonding field which describes the adhesion effect. We derive a variational formulation of the mechanical problem and, under a smallness assumption, we establish an existence theorem of a weak solution including a regularity result. The proof is based on the time-discretization method, the Banach fixed point theorem and arguments of lower semicontinuity, compactness and monotonicity.