Numerical analysis and simulations of a frictional contact problem with damage and memory

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper, we study a frictional contact model which takes into account the damage and the memory. The deformable body consists of a viscoelastic material and the process is assumed to be quasistatic. The mechanical damage of the material which caused by the tension or the compression is included in the constitutive law and the damage function is modelled by a nonlinear parabolic inclusion. Then the variational formulation of the model is governed by a coupled system consisting of a history-dependent hemivariational inequality and a nonlinear parabolic variational inequality. We introduce and study a fully discrete scheme of the problem and derive error estimates for numerical solutions. Under appropriate solution regularity assumptions, an optimal order error estimate is derived for the linear finite element method. Several numerical experiments for the contact problem are given for providing numerical evidence of the theoretical results.</p>