Quintic splines solutions of a class of contact problems

Abstract

Many unrelated moving and free boundary value problems that arise in elasticity, transportation, economics, fluid dynamics and mechanics are studied in a general and unified framework of variational inequalities. In this paper we show that a class of variational inequalities related with contact problems in elastostatics can be characterized by a sequence of variational equations, which are solved using modified quintic splines collocation methods. The variational inequality formulation is used to discuss the problem of uniqueness and existence of the solution of the contact problems.