Mathematical results on existence for viscoelastodynamic problems with unilateral constraints

Abstract

We study a damped wave equation and the evolution of a Kelvin-Voigt material, both problems have unilateral boundary conditions. Under appropriate regularity assumptions on the initial data, both problems possess a weak solution which is obtained as the limit of a sequence of penalized problems; the functional properties of all the traces are precisely identified through Fourier analysis, and this enables us to infer the existence of a strong solution.