Frictionless contact problems for elastic hemitropic solids: Boundary variational inequality approach

Abstract

The frictionless contact problems for two interacting hemitropic solids with different elastic properties is investigated under the condition of natural impenetrability of one medium into the other. We consider two cases, the so-called coercive case (when elastic media are fixed along some parts of their boundaries), and the semicoercive case (the boundaries of the interacting elastic media are not fixed). Using the potential theory we reduce the problems to the boundary variational inequalities and analyse the existence and uniqueness of weak solutions. In the semicoercive case, the necessary and sufficient conditions of solvability of the corresponding contact problems are written out explicitly.