Alternating iteration and elliptic variational inequalities

Summary Free boundary value problems, too complicated for formulation as a variational inequality, are broken up into two problems on overlapping regions. On one region the problem is treated as an ordinary boundary value problem; on the second region, the free boundary part of the problem is reduced to a variational inequality. By solving the two problems successively it is shown that under certain conditions the successive solutions converge to a single function that gives a solution of the original problem. Application to a filtration problem is given.