Investigation of the equilibrium states and their stability for a simple model with unilateral contact and Coulomb friction

Abstract

We are interested in the stability properties of the equilibrium states of a simple mechanical system with unilateral contact and Coulomb friction. First, we give a complete description of the set of solutions that the equilibrium problem may have, depending on the stiffness coefficients, on the external forces and on the friction coefficient. In the second part, we present the stability properties of all these equilibrium states, obtained by appropriate numerical experiments.