Nonsmooth and nonconvex models arise in several important applications of mechanics and engineering. The interest in this field is growing from both mathematicians and engineers. The study of numerous industrial applications, including contact phenomena in statics and dynamics or delamination effects in composites, require the consideration of nonsmoothness and nonconvexity. The mathematical topics discussed in this book include variational and hemivariational inequalities, duality, complementarity, variational principles, sensitivity analysis, eigenvalue and resonance problems, and minimax problems. Applications are considered in the following areas among others: nonsmooth statics and dynamics, stability of quasi- static evolution processes, friction problems, adhesive contact and debonding, inverse problems, pseudoelastic modeling of phase transitions, chaotic behavior in nonlinear beams, and nonholonomic mechanical systems. This volume contains 22 chapters written by various leading researchers and presents a cohesive and authoritative overview of recent results and applications in the area of nonsmooth and nonconvex mechanics. Audience: Faculty, graduate students, and researchers in applied mathematics, optimization, control and engineering.

This book’s title, Nonsmooth Mechanics and Analysis, refers to a major domain of mechanics, particularly those initiated by the works of Jean Jacques Moreau. Nonsmooth mechanics concerns mechanical situations with possible nondifferentiable relationships, eventually discontinuous, as unilateral contact, dry friction, collisions, plasticity, damage, and phase transition. The basis of the approach consists in dealing with such problems without resorting to any regularization process. Indeed, the nonsmoothness is due to simplified mechanical modeling; a more sophisticated model would require too large a number of variables, and sometimes the mechanical information is not available via experimental investigations. Therefore, the mathematical formulation becomes nonsmooth; regularizing would only be a trick of arithmetic without any physical justification. Nonsmooth analysis was developed, especially in Montpellier, to provide specific theoretical and numerical tools to deal with nonsmoothness. It is important not only in mechanics but also in physics, robotics, and economics. Audience This book is intended for researchers in mathematics and mechanics.

Nonsmooth mechanics is a relatively complex field and requires a good knowledge of mechanics as well as a good background in some parts of modern mathematics. The present volume of lecture notes follows a very successful advanced school, with the aim to cover as much as possible all these aspects. It includes contributions that cover mechanical aspects as well as the mathematical and numerical treatment.

Complementarity, duality, and symmetry are closely related concepts, and have always been a rich source of inspiration in human understanding through the centuries, particularly in mathematics and science. The Proceedings of IUTAM Symposium on Complementarity, Duality, and Symmetry in Nonlinear Mechanics brings together some of world's leading researchers in both mathematics and mechanics to provide an interdisciplinary but engineering flavoured exploration of the field's foundation and state of the art developments. Topics addressed in this book deal with fundamental theory, methods, and applications of complementarity, duality and symmetry in multidisciplinary fields of nonlinear mechanics, including nonconvex and nonsmooth elasticity, dynamics, phase transitions, plastic limit and shakedown analysis of hardening materials and structures, bifurcation analysis, entropy optimization, free boundary value problems, minimax theory, fluid mechanics, periodic soliton resonance, constrained mechanical systems, finite element methods and computational mechanics. A special invited paper presented important research opportunities and challenges of the theoretical and applied mechanics as well as engineering materials in the exciting information age. Audience: This book is addressed to all scientists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians, as well as advanced students (doctoral and post-doctoral level) at universities and in industry.

The articles that comprise this distinguished annual volume for the Advances in Mechanics and Mathematics series have been written in honor of Gilbert Strang, a world renowned mathematician and exceptional person. Written by leading experts in complementarity, duality, global optimization, and quantum computations, this collection reveals the beauty of these mathematical disciplines and investigates recent developments in global optimization, nonconvex and nonsmooth analysis, nonlinear programming, theoretical and engineering mechanics, large scale computation, quantum algorithms and computation, and information theory.

This volume presents and discusses recent advances in boundary element methods and their solid mechanics applications. It illustrates these methods in their latest forms, developed during the last five to ten years, and demonstrates their advantages in solving a wide range of solid mechanics problems.

This book on canonical duality theory provides a comprehensive review of its philosophical origin, physics foundation, and mathematical statements in both finite- and infinite-dimensional spaces. A ground-breaking methodological theory, canonical duality theory can be used for modeling complex systems within a unified framework and for solving a large class of challenging problems in multidisciplinary fields in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences. This volume places a particular emphasis on canonical duality theory’s role in bridging the gap between non-convex analysis/mechanics and global optimization. With 18 total chapters written by experts in their fields, this volume provides a nonconventional theory for unified understanding of the fundamental difficulties in large deformation mechanics, bifurcation/chaos in nonlinear science, and the NP-hard problems in global optimization. Additionally, readers will find a unified methodology and powerful algorithms for solving challenging problems in complex systems with real-world applications in non-convex analysis, non-monotone variational inequalities, integer programming, topology optimization, post-buckling of large deformed structures, etc. Researchers and graduate students will find explanation and potential applications in multidisciplinary fields.

Nonconvexity and nonsmoothness arise in a large class of engineering applica tions. In many cases of practical importance the possibilities offered by opti mization with its algorithms and heuristics can substantially improve the per formance and the range of applicability of classical computational mechanics algorithms. For a class of problems this approach is the only one that really works. The present book presents in a comprehensive way the application of opti mization algorithms and heuristics in smooth and nonsmooth mechanics. The necessity of this approach is presented to the reader through simple, represen tative examples. As things become more complex, the necessary material from convex and nonconvex optimization and from mechanics are introduced in a self-contained way. Unilateral contact and friction problems, adhesive contact and delamination problems, nonconvex elastoplasticity, fractal friction laws, frames with semi rigid connections, are among the applications which are treated in details here. Working algorithms are given for each application and are demonstrated by means of representative examples. The interested reader will find helpful references to up-to-date scientific and technical literature so that to be able to work on research or engineering topics which are not directly covered here.

This book reflects a significant part of authors' research activity dur ing the last ten years. The present monograph is constructed on the results obtained by the authors through their direct cooperation or due to the authors separately or in cooperation with other mathematicians. All these results fit in a unitary scheme giving the structure of this work. The book is mainly addressed to researchers and scholars in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Mechanics, Physics and Engineering. We are greatly indebted to Viorica Venera Motreanu for the careful reading of the manuscript and helpful comments on important issues. We are also grateful to our Editors of Kluwer Academic Publishers for their professional assistance. Our deepest thanks go to our numerous scientific collaborators and friends, whose work was so important for us. D. Motreanu and V. Radulescu IX Introduction The present monograph is based on original results obtained by the authors in the last decade. This book provides a comprehensive expo sition of some modern topics in nonlinear analysis with applications to the study of several classes of boundary value problems. Our framework includes multivalued elliptic problems with discontinuities, variational inequalities, hemivariational inequalities and evolution problems. The treatment relies on variational methods, monotonicity principles, topo logical arguments and optimization techniques. Excepting Sections 1 and 3 in Chapter 1 and Sections 1 and 3 in Chapter 2, the material is new in comparison with any other book, representing research topics where the authors contributed. The outline of our work is the following.