Well-posedness of evolutionary differential variational–hemivariational inequalities and applications to frictional contact mechanics

Abstract

In this paper, we study the well-posedness of a class of evolutionary variational–hemivariational inequalities coupled with a nonlinear ordinary differential equation in Banach spaces. The proof is based on an iterative approximation scheme showing that the problem has a unique mild solution. In addition, we established the continuity of the flow map with respect to the initial data. Under the general framework, we consider two new applications for modeling of frictional contact for viscoelastic materials. In the first application, we consider Coulomb’s friction with normal compliance, and in the second, normal damped response. The structure of the friction coefficient μ is new with motivation from geophysical applications in earth sciences with dependence on an external state variable α and the slip rate |˙uτ |.