Copyright © 2011 Boudjemaa Teniou and Sabrina Benferdi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is the variational study of the contact with adhesion between an elastic material and a rigid foundation in the quasistatic process where the deformations are supposed to be small. The behavior of this material is modelled by a nonlinear elastic law and the contact is modelled with Signorini's conditions and adhesion. The evolution of bonding field is described by a nonlinear differential equation. We derive a variational formulation of the mechanical problem, and we prove the existence and uniqueness of the weak solution using a theorem on variational inequalities, the theorem of Cauchy-Lipschitz, a lemma of Gronwall, as well as the fixed point of Banach.