Existence and uniqueness of global weak solutions to strain-limiting viscoelasticity with Dirichlet boundary data

TL;DR

This paper proves the existence and uniqueness of global weak solutions for a class of nonlinear viscoelastic models with implicit constitutive relations, including limiting strain models where strain remains small regardless of stress magnitude.

Contribution

It establishes a new existence and uniqueness theory for implicit constitutive relations in viscoelasticity, especially addressing nonreflexive spaces in limiting strain models.

Findings

Existence and uniqueness of solutions for a broad class of implicit models.

Handling of nonreflexive function spaces in limiting strain models.

Applicability to large-data initial conditions with finite elastic energy.

Abstract

We consider a system of evolutionary equations that is capable of describing certain viscoelastic effects in linearized yet nonlinear models of solid mechanics. The essence of the paper is that the constitutive relation, involving the Cauchy stress, the small strain tensor and the symmetric velocity gradient, is given in an implicit form. For a large class of implicit constitutive relations we establish the existence and uniqueness of a global-in-time large-data weak solution. We then focus on the class of so-called limiting strain models, i.e., models for which the magnitude of the strain tensor is known to remain small a priori, regardless of the magnitude of the Cauchy stress tensor. For this class of models, a new technical difficulty arises, which is that the Cauchy stress is only an integrable function over its domain of definition, resulting in the underlying function spaces being nonreflexive and thus the weak compactness of bounded sequences of elements of these spaces is lost. Nevertheless, even for problems of this type we are able to provide a satisfactory existence theory, as long as the initial data have finite elastic energy and the boundary data fulfill natural compatibility conditions.