Quasistatic delamination problem

We study delamination of two elastic bodies glued together by an adhesive that can undergo a unidirectional inelastic rate-independent process. The quasistatic delamination process is thus activated by time-dependent external loadings, realized through body forces and displacements prescribed on parts of the boundary. The novelty of this work consists in considering the glue as infinitesimally thin and ideally rigid in the sense that a crack in the glue cannot be seen before, speaking “microscopically”, all macromolecular links of the adhesive are fully debonded. The concept of energetic solution is applied and existence of such solutions is proved by showing Γ-convergence of a suitable approximation that, in addition, allows for a direct computer implementation, unlike the original problem.