NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF A GENERAL ELLIPTIC VARIATIONAL-HEMIVARIATIONAL INEQUALITY

This paper is devoted to the numerical analysis of a general elliptic variational-hemivariational inequality. After a review of a solution existence and uniqueness result, we introduce a family of Galerkin methods to solve the problem. We prove the convergence of the numerical method under the minimal solution regularity condition available from the existence result and derive a Ce ' a's inequality for er-ror estimation of the numerical solutions. Then, we apply the results for the numerical analysis of a variational-hemivariational inequality in the study of a static problem which models the contact of an elastic body with a reactive foundation. In particular, under appropriate solution regularity conditions, we derive an optimal order error estimate for the linear finite element solution.