ELASTOPLASTIC BODIES IN DYNAMIC CONTACT

A classical approach to the problem of contact of an elastoplastic body with an elastoplastic obstacle consists in applying a variant of the
penalty method. Instead, we propose here to reformulate it equivalently as a PDE with hysteresis operators both in the constitutive law and in the contact boundary condition. Analytical properties of the hysteresis operators (Lipschitz continuity in suitable function spaces, monotonicity, energy inequalities) enable us to construct a regular solution by conventional Galerkin approximations and prove its uniqueness for each given data. This is a joint work with Adrien Petrov, INSA Lyon.