Weak formulations of quasistatic frictional contact problems

Abstract

We consider a general mathematical model which describes the quasistatic contact of a deformable body with an obstacle, the so-called foundation. The material’s behaviour is modeled with a visco-elastic-type constitutive law and the contact is described with a general interface law associated to a version of Coulomb’s law of dry friction. We list the assumptions on the data and provide relevant examples of constitutive laws and boundary conditions. Then, we derive two different variational formulations of the model in which the unknowns are the displacement and the strain field, respectively. We prove the equivalence of these formulations. Finally, we use recent arguments of sweeping process in order to obtain the existence of a unique weak solution to the contact model.