Quasistatic adhesive contact of visco-elastic bodies and its numerical treatment for very small viscosity

Abstract: An adhesive unilateral contact of elastic bodies with a small viscosity in the linear Kelvin-Voigt rheology at small strains is scrutinized. The flow-rule for debonding the adhesive is considered rate-independent and unidirectional, and inertia is neglected. The asymptotics for the viscosity approaching zero towards purely elastic material involves a certain defect-like measure recording in some sense natural additional energy dissipated in the bulk due to (vanishing) viscosity, which is demonstrated on particular 2-dimensional computational simulations based on a semi-implicit time discretisation and a spacial discretisation implemented by boundary-element method.