WELL-POSEDNESS OF A NONLINEAR INTERFACE PROBLEM DESCRIBED BY HEMIVARIATIONAL INEQUALITIES VIA BOUNDARY INTEGRAL OPERATORS

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the well-posedness of a novel nonlinear interface problem on an unbounded domain with nonmonotone set-valued transmission conditions. This interface problem involves a nonlinear monotone partial differential equation in the interior domain and the Laplacian in the exterior domain. Such a scalar interface problem models nonmonotone frictional contact of elastic infinite media. The variational formulation of the interface problem leads to a hemivariational inequality (HVI), which however lives on the unbounded domain, and thus cannot be analyzed in a reflexive Banach space setting. Boundary integral methods lead to another HVI that is amenable to functional analytic methods using standard Sobolev spaces on the interior domain and Sobolev spaces of fractional order on the coupling boundary. Broadening the scope of the paper, we consider extended real-valued HVIs augmented by convex extended real-valued functions. Under a smallness hypothesis, we provide existence and uniqueness results and, moreover, establish a stability result for extended real-valued HVIs with respect to the extended real-valued function as a parameter. Based on the latter general stability result, we provide various stability results for the interface problem, as well as the stability of a related bilateral obstacle interface problem with respect to the obstacles.