Damage and delamination processes in thermo‐viscoelastic materials

Abstract

This contribution addresses several models for rate-independent damage and delamination processes in thermo-viscoelastic materials. In the spirit of continuum damage mechanics, both degradation phenomena are modeled by means of internal variables, governed by a rate-independent flow rule. The latter is coupled in a highly nonlinear way with the heat equation and the momentum balance for the displacements. We present a suitable weak formulation for this class of models, and discuss existence and approximation results in the framework of variational convergence.