An elastic-viscoplastic quasistatic contact problem with damage

In this paper, the contact between an elastic-viscoplastic body and a deformable obstacle is studied. The effect of the damage, due to tension or compression, is also considered. The variational formulation leads to a coupled system of evolutionary equations for which an existence and uniqueness result is stated. Then, a fully discrete scheme is introduced using the finite element method to approximate the spatial variable and an Euler scheme to discretize the time derivatives. Error estimates are obtained and, as a consequence, the convergence of the algorithm is deduced. Finally, some numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the algorithm. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.