Numerical Analysis of an Adhesive Contact Problem with Long Memory

Abstract

Spatially semidiscrete and fully discrete schemes for a variational-hemivariational inequality, which describes adhesive contact between a deformable body of a viscoelastic material with long memory and a foundation are constructed. The variational formulation of the problem is represented by a system coupling a nonlinear integral equation with a history-dependent variational-hemivariational inequality. Assuming certain regularity of the solution and using piecewise linear finite element function for displacements and piecewise constant functions for bonding field, we obtain optimal order error estimates.