OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS FOR A THERMOELASTIC FRICTIONAL CONTACT PROBLEM

Abstract

In the present paper, we analyze and study the control of a static thermoelastic contact problem. We consider a model which describes a frictional contact problem between a thermoelastic body and a deformable heat conductor obstacle. We derive a variational formulation of the model which is in the form of a coupled system of the quasi-variational inequality of elliptic type for the displacement and the nonlinear variational equation for the temperature. Then, under a smallness assumption, we prove the existence of a unique weak solution to the problem. Moreover, we establish the dependence of the solution with respect to the data and prove a convergence result. Finally, we introduce an optimization problem related to the contact model for which we prove the existence of a minimizer and provide a convergence result.