A Rate-Independent Approach to the Delamination Problem

Abstract

We study delamination processes for elastic bodies glued together by an adhesive as an activated, rate-independent process. The adhesive is assumed to absorb a specific amount of energy during the delami-nation process. A solution is defined by energetic principles of stability and balance of stored and dissipated energies with the work of external loading, realized here through displacement on parts of the boundary. Starting from a time discretization, we construct solutions via a rigorous limiting analysis. Moreover, we provide computer simulations for some model problems using a further finite-element spatial discretization.