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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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    [Gamma]-limits and relaxations for rate-independent evolutionary problems
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2006) Mielke, Alexander; Toubíček, Tomáš; Stefanelli, Ulisse
    This work uses the energetic formulation of rate-independent systems that is based on the stored-energy functionals ε and the dissipation distance D. For sequences (ε k)k ∈ ℕ and (D k)k ∈ ℕ we address the question under which conditions the limits q∞ of solutions qk: [0,T] → Q satisfy a suitable limit problem with limit functionals ε∞ and D∞, which are the corresponding Γ-limits. We derive a sufficient condition, called emphconditional upper semi-continuity of the stable sets, which is essential to guarantee that q∞ solves the limit problem. In particular, this condition holds if certain emphjoint recovery sequences exist. Moreover, we show that time-incremental minimization problems can be used to approximate the solutions. A first example involves the numerical approximation of functionals using finite-element spaces. A second example shows that the stop and the play operator convergece if the yield sets converge in the sense of Mosco. The third example deals with a problem developing microstructure in the limit k → ∞, which in the limit can be described by an effective macroscopic model.