On the coupling of regularization techniques and the boundary element method for a hemivariational inequality modelling a delamination problem

In this paper, we couple regularization techniques of nondifferentiable optimization with the h‐version of the boundary element method (h‐BEM) to solve nonsmooth variational problems arising in contact mechanics. As a model example, we consider the delamination problem. The variational formulation of this problem leads to a hemivariational inequality with a nonsmooth functional defined on the contact boundary. This problem is first regularized and then discretized by an h‐BEM. We prove convergence of the h‐BEM Galerkin solution of the regularized problem in the energy norm, provide an a priori error estimate and give a numerical examples. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.