Analysis of a multidimensional thermoviscoelastic contact problem under the Green–Lindsay theory.

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the existence, the stability and the numerical approximation of a multidimensional dynamic contact problem modeling the evolution of displacement and temperature in a viscoelastic body that may come into contact with a deformable foundation. The viscoelastic body is assumed to behave according to Kelvin–Voigt constitutive law with added thermal effects under the Green–Lindsay theory. We prove that the presence of viscoelastic terms in the equations provides additional regularity and then an existence and uniqueness result is obtained using the Faedo–Galerkin method. An energy decay property is also shown under the assumption of radial symmetry. Then, a numerical approximation based on the finite element method is proposed. A stability result is proved from which the decay of the discrete energy is deduced. A priori error estimates are shown from which the linear convergence is derived under suitable additional regularity conditions. Finally, some numerical experiments are described to support our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]