A VISCOPLASTIC CONTACT PROBLEM WITH FRICTION AND ADHESION

The aim of this paper is to present a new result in the study of a contact problem between a viscoplastic body and an obstacle, the so-called foundation. The process is supposed to be quasistatic and the contact is modelled with a version of Coulomb's law of dry friction, normal compliance and an ordinary differential equation which describes the adhesion effect. We derive a variational formulation for the model and under smallness assumption, we establish the existence of a weak solution to the problem. The proof is based on the Rothe time-discretization method, the Banach fixed point theorem and arguments of monotonicity, compactness and lower semicontinuity.