A contact problem for viscoelastic bodies with inertial effects and unilateral boundary constraints

We consider a viscoelastic body occupying a smooth bounded domain under the effect of a volumic traction force. Inertial effects are considered; hence the equation for the macroscopic displacement contains a second order term. On a part of the boundary, the body is anchored to a support and no displacement may occur; on a second part, the body can move freely, and on a third part the body is in adhesive contact with a solid support. The boundary forces coming to the action of elastic stresses are responsible for delamination, i.e., progressive failure of adhesive bonds. Following the lines of a new approach based on duality methods in Sobolev-Bochner spaces, we define a suitable concept of weak solution to the resulting PDE system and correspondingly we prove an existence result on finite time intervals of arbitrary length.