Analysis of a thermo-elasto-viscoplastic contact problem with wear and damage

Abstract

This paper presents a quasistatic problem of a thermo-elaso-visco-plastic body in frictional contact with a moving foundation. The contact is modelled with the normal compliance condition and the associated law of dry friction. The model takes into account wear of the contact surface of the body caused by the friction and which is described by the Archard law. The mechanical damage of the material, caused by excessive stress or strain, is described by the damage function, the evolution of which is determined by a parabolic inclusion. We list the assumptions on the data and derive a variational formulation of the mechanical problem. Existence and uniqueness of the weak solution for the problem is proved using the theory of evolutionary variational inequalities, parabolic variational inequalities, first order evolution equation and Banach fixed point.