AN ELASTIC CONTACT PROBLEM WITH ADHESION AND NORMAL COMPLIANCE

We study a mathematical problem describing the friction-less adhesive contact between an elastic body and a foundation. The adhesion process is modelled by a surface variable, the bonding field, and the contact is modelled with a normal compliance condition; the tangential shear due to the bonding field is included; the elastic constitutive law is assumed to be nonlinear and the process is quasistatic. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear system in which the unknowns are the displacement, the stress and the bonding field. The existence of a unique weak solution for the problem is established by using arguments for differential equations followed by the construction of an appropriate contraction mapping.