ANALYSIS OF A CONTACT PROBLEM WITH NORMAL COMPLIANCE, FINITE PENETRATION AND NONMONOTONE SLIP DEPENDENT FRICTION.

We consider a mathematical model which describes the frictional contact between a linearly elastic body and an obstacle, the so-called foundation. The process is static and the contact is modeled with normal compliance condition of such a type that the penetration is restricted with unilateral constraint. The friction is modeled with a nonmonotone law in which the friction bound depends both on the tangential displacement and on the value of the penetration. In order to approximate the contact conditions, we consider a regularized problem wherein the contact is modeled by a standard normal compliance condition without finite penetrations. For each problem, we derive a variational formulation and an existence result of the weak solutions of regularized problems is obtained. Next, we prove the convergence of the weak solutions of regularized problems to the weak solution of the initial nonregularized problem. Finally, we provide a numerical validation of this convergence result. To this end we introduce a discrete scheme for the numerical approximation of the frictional contact problems. The solution of the resulting nonsmooth and nonconvex frictional contact problems is found, basing on approximation by a sequence of nonsmooth convex programming problems. Some numerical simulation results are presented in the study of an academic two-dimensional example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]