Phenomena of contact between deformable bodies or between deformable and rigid bodies abound in industry and in everyday life. A few simple examples are brake pads with wheels, tires on roads, and pistons with skirts. Common industrial processes such as metal forming and metal extrusion involve contact evolutions. Because of the importance of contact processes in structural and mechanical systems, considerable effort has been put into modeling and numerical simulations. This book introduces readers to a mathematical theory of contact problems involving deformable bodies. It covers mechanical modeling, mathematical formulations, variational analysis, and the numerical solution of the associated formulations. The authors give a complete treatment of some contact problems by presenting arguments and results in modeling, analysis, and numerical simulations. Variational analysis of the models includes existence and uniqueness results of weak solutions, as well as results of continuous dependence of the solution on the data and parameters.

Also discussed are links between different mechanical models. In carrying out the variational analysis, the authors systematically use results on elliptic and evolutionary variational inequalities, convex analysis, nonlinear equations with monotone operators, and fixed points of operators. Prerequisites include basic functional analysis, variational formulations of partial differential equation problems, and numerical approximations. The text is suitable for graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics, computational mathematics, and computational mechanics.