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Now showing 1 - 10 of 37
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    A class of minimum principles for characterizing the trajectories and the relaxation of dissipative systems
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2006) Mielke, Alexander; Ortiz, Michael
    This work is concerned with the reformulation of evolutionary problems in a weak form enabling consideration of solutions that may exhibit evolving microstructures. This reformulation is accomplished by expressing the evolutionary problem in variational form, i.e., by identifying a functional whose minimizers represent entire trajectories of the system. The particular class of functionals under consideration is derived by first defining a sequence of time-discretized minimum problems and subsequently formally passing to the limit of continuous time. The resulting functionals may be regarded as elliptic regularizations of the original evolutionary problem. We find that the $Gamma$-limits of interest are highly degenerate and provide limited information regarding the limiting trajectories of the system. Instead we seek to characterize the minimizing trajectories directly. The special class of problems characterized by a rate-independent dissipation functional is amenable to a particularly illuminating analysis. For these systems it is possible to derive a priori bounds that are independent of the regularizing parameter, whence it is possible to extract convergent subsequences and find the limiting trajectories. Under general assumptions on the functionals, we show that all such limits satisfy the energetic formulation (S) & (E) for rate-independent systems. Moreover, we show that the accumulation points of the regularized solutions solve the associated limiting energetic formulation.
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    Existence results for a contact problem with varying friction coefficient and nonlinear forces
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2006) Schmid, Florian; Mielke, Alexander
    We consider the rate-independent problem of a particle moving in a three - dimensional half space subject to a time-dependent nonlinear restoring force having a convex potential and to Coulomb friction along the flat boundary of the half space, where the friction coefficient may vary along the boundary. Our existence result allows for solutions that may switch arbitrarily often between unconstrained motion in the interior and contact where the solutions may switch between sticking and frictional sliding. However, our existence result is local and guarantees continuous solutions only as long as the convexity of the potential is strong enough to compensate the variation of the friction coefficient times the contact pressure. By simple examples we show that our sufficient conditions are also necessary. Our method is based on the energetic formulation of rate-independent systems as developed by Mielke and co-workers. We generalize the time-incremental minimization procedure of Mielke and Rossi for the present situation of a non-associative flow rule.
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    Damage of nonlinearly elastic materials at small strain : existence and regularity results
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2009) Thomas, Marita; Mielke, Alexander
    Literaturverz. S. 31 In this paper an existence result for energetic solutions of rate-independent damage processes is established and the temporal regularity of the solution is discussed. We consider a body consisting of a physically nonlinearly elastic material undergoing small deformations and partial damage. The present work is a generalization of [Mielke-Roubicek 2006] concerning the properties of the stored elastic energy density as well as the suitable Sobolev space for the damage variable: While previous work assumes that the damage variable z satisfies z ? W^1,r (Omega) with r>d for Omega ? R^d, we can handle the case r>1 by a new technique for the construction of joint recovery sequences. Moreover, this work generalizes the temporal regularity results to physically nonlinearly elastic materials by analyzing Lipschitz- and Hölder-continuity of solutions with respect to time.
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    Energy release rate for cracks in finite-strain elasticity
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2006) Knees, Dorothee; Mielke, Alexander
    Griffith's fracture criterion describes in a quasistatic setting whether or not a pre-existing crack in an elastic body is stationary for given external forces. In terms of the energy release rate (ERR), which is the derivative of the deformation energy of the body with respect to a virtual crack extension, this criterion reads: If the ERR is less than a specific constant, then the crack is stationary, otherwise it will grow. In this paper, we consider geometrically nonlinear elastic models with polyconvex energy densities and prove that the ERR is well defined. Moreover, without making any assumption on the smoothness of minimizers, we derive rigorously the well-known Griffith formula and the $J$-integral, from which the ERR can be calculated. The proofs are based on a weak convergence result for Eshelby tensors.
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    Complete damage evolution based on energies and stresses
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2009) Mielke, Alexander
    The rate-independent damage model recently developed in Bouchitté, Mielke, Roubícek ``A complete-damage problem at small strains" allows for complete damage, such that the deformation is no longer well-defined. The evolution can be described in terms of energy densities and stresses. Using concepts of parametrized Gamma convergence, we generalize the theory to convex, but non-quadratic elastic energies by providing Gamma convergence of energetic solutions from partial to complete damage under rather general conditions
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    Differential, energetic, and metric formulations for rate-independent processes
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2009) Mielke, Alexander
    We consider different solution concepts for rate-independent systems. This includes energetic solutions in the topological setting and differentiable, local, parametrized and BV solutions in the Banach-space setting. The latter two solution concepts rely on the method of vanishing viscosity, in which solutions of the rate-independent system are defined as limits of solutions of systems with small viscosity. Finally, we also show how the theory of metric evolutionary systems can be used to define parametrized and BV solutions in metric spaces.
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    Global existence for rate-independent gradient plasticity at finite strain
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2008) Mainik, Andreas; Mielke, Alexander
    We provide a global existence result for the time-continuous elastoplasticity problem using the energetic formulation. For this we show that the geometric nonlinearities via the multiplicative decomposition of the strain can be controlled via polyconvexity and a priori stress bounds in terms of the energy density. While temporal oscillations are controlled via the energy dissipation the spatial compactness is obtain via the regularizing terms involving gradients of the internal variables.
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    BV solutions and viscosity approximations of rate-independent systems
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2009) Mielke, Alexander; Rossi, Riccarda; Savaré, Giuseppe
    In the nonconvex case solutions of rate-independent systems may develop jumps as a function of time. To model such jumps, we adopt the philosophy that rate independence should be considered as limit of systems with smaller and smaller viscosity. For the finite-dimensional case we study the vanishing-viscosity limit of doubly nonlinear equations given in terms of a differentiable energy functional and a dissipation potential which is a viscous regularization of a given rate-independent dissipation potential. The resulting definition of `BV solutions' involves, in a nontrivial way, both the rate-independent and the viscous dissipation potential, which play a crucial role in the description of the associated jump trajectories. We shall prove a general convergence result for the time-continuous and for the time-discretized viscous approximations and establish various properties of the limiting $BV$ solutions. In particular, we shall provide a careful description of the jumps and compare the new notion of solutions with the related concepts of energetic and local solutions to rate-independent systems.
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    Multi-pulse evolution and space-time chaos in dissipative systems
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2006) Zelik, Sergey; Mielke, Alexander
    We study semilinear parabolic systems on the full space Rn that admit a family of exponentially decaying pulse-like steady states obtained via translations. The multi-pulse solutions under consideration look like the sum of infinitely many such pulses which are well separated. We prove a global center-manifold reduction theorem for the temporal evolution of such multi-pulse solutions and show that the dynamics of these solutions can be described by an infinite systems of ODEs for the positions of the pulses. As an application of the developed theory, we verify the existence of Sinai-Bunimovich space-time chaos in 1D space-time periodically forced Swift-Hohenberg equation.
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    Continuum descriptions for the dynamics in discrete lattices : derivation and justification
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2006) Giannoulis, Johannes; Herrmann, Michael; Mielke, Alexander
    The passage from microscopic systems to macroscopic ones is studied by starting from spatially discrete lattice systems and deriving several continuum limits. The lattice system is an infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian system displaying a variety of different dynamical behavior. Depending on the initial conditions one sees quite different behavior like macroscopic elastic deformations associated with acoustic waves or like propagation of optical pulses. We show how on a formal level different macroscopic systems can be derived such as the Korteweg-de Vries equation, the nonlinear Schroedinger equation, Whitham's modulation equation, the three-wave interaction model, or the energy transport equation using the Wigner measure. We also address the question how the microscopic Hamiltonian and the Lagrangian structures transfer to similar structures on the macroscopic level. Finally we discuss rigorous analytical convergence results of the microscopic system to the macroscopic one by either weak-convergence methods or by quantitative error bounds.