8 Viscoelastic Contact

Abstract

We describe results for contact problems involving viscoelastic materials. It will be seen that adding viscosity to the models leads to a substantial increase in the regularity or the smoothness of the solutions, and this allows for further analysis. Unlike the case of problems for purely elastic materials, there are numerous results for viscoelastic problems with varying degrees of generality, and with different boundary conditions. Equally important is the observation that for many of these problems the uniqueness of the solutions and their continuous dependence on the problem data are proven.