Thermal effects in adhesive contact : modelling and analysis

In this paper, we consider a contact problem with adhesion between a viscoelastic body and a rigid support, taking thermal effects into account. The PDE system we deal with is derived within the modelling approach proposed by Frémond and, in particular, includes the entropy balance equations, describing the evolution of the temperatures of the body and of the adhesive material. Our main result shows the existence of global in time solutions (to a suitable variational formulation) of the related initial and boundary value problem.