A dynamic unilateral contact problem with adhesion and friction in viscoelasticity

The aim of this paper is to study an interaction law coupling recoverable adhesion, friction and unilateral contact between two viscoelastic bodies of Kelvin–Voigt type. A dynamic contact problem with adhesion and nonlocal friction is considered and its variational formulation is written as the coupling between an implicit variational inequality and a parabolic variational inequality describing the evolution of the intensity of adhesion. The existence and approximation of variational solutions are analysed, based on a penalty method, some abstract results and compactness properties. Finally, some numerical examples are presented.