2008, Mielke, Alexander, Petrov, Adrien, Martins, João A.C.

This paper discusses the convergence of kinetic variational inequalities to rate-independent quasi-static variational inequalities. Mathematical formulations as well as existence and uniqueness results for kinetic and rate-independent quasi-static problems are provided. Sharp a priori estimates for the kinetic problem are derived that imply that the kinetic solutions converge to the rate-independent ones, when the size of initial perturbations and the rate of application of the forces tends to 0. An application to three-dimensional elastic-plastic systems with hardening is given.

2011, Mielke, Alexander

We consider rate-independent evolutionary systems over a physically domain Ω that are governed by simple hysteresis operators at each material point. For multiscale systems where ε denotes the ratio between the microscopic and the macroscopic length scale, we show that in the limit ε → 0 we are led to systems where the hysteresis operators at each macroscopic point is a generalized Prandtl-Ishlinskii operator.