Evolutional contact with Coulomb's friction on a periodic microstructure

We consider the elasticity problem in a heterogeneous domain with an ε-periodic micro-structure, ε ≪ 1, including a multiple micro-contact in a simply connected matrix domain with inclusions completely surrounded by cracks, which do not connect the boundary, or a textile-like material. The contact is described by the Signorini and Coulomb-friction contact conditions. In the case of the Coulomb friction, the dissipative functional is state dependent, like in 2]. A time discretization scheme from 2] reduces the contact problem to the Tresca one (with prescribed frictional traction or state independent dissipation) on each time-increment. We further look for the spatial homogenization. The limiting energy and the dissipation term in the stability condition were obtained for the contact with Tresca's friction law in 4] for closed cracks and can be extended to textile-like materials. Using these results and the concept of energetic solutions for evolutional quasi-variational problems from 2], for a uniform time-step partition, the existence can be proved for the solution of the continuous problem and a subsequence of incremental solutions weakly converging to the continuous one uniformly in time. Furthermore, the irreversible frictional displacements at micro-level lead to a kind of an evolutional plastic behavior of the homogenized medium. (© 2013 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)