Analysis of a dynamic viscoelastic unilateral contact problem with normal damped response

In this paper we deal with a viscoelastic unilateral contact problem with normal damped response. The process is assumed to be dynamic and frictionless. Normal damping function is modeled by the Clarke subdifferential of a nonconvex and nonsmooth function. First, the variational formulation of this problem is provided in the form of a nonlinear first order variational–hemivariational inequality for the velocity field. Then, based on the surjectivity results for pseudomonotone and maximal monotone operators, we obtain the unique solvability for a new class of abstract evolutionary variational-hemivariational inequalities. Finally, we apply our abstract results to prove the existence of a unique weak solution to the corresponding contact problem.