Measure-valued solutions for models of ferroelectric materials

Abstract

In this work we study the solvability of the initial boundary-value problems that model the quasi-static nonlinear behaviour of ferroelectric materials. Similar to the metal plasticity, the energy functional of a ferroelectric material can be additively decomposed into reversible and remanent parts. The remanent part associated with the remanent state of the material is assumed to be a convex non-quadratic function f of internal variables. In this work we introduce the notion of the measure-valued solutions for the ferroelectric models, and show their existence in the rate-dependent case, assuming the coercivity of the function f. Regularizing the energy functional by a quadratic positive-definite term, which can be viewed as hardening, we show the existence of measure-valued solutions for the rate-independent and rate-dependent problems, avoiding the coercivity assumption on f.