ABSTRACT
We begin with a description of the general physical setting of contact problems to be studied in this book. We first introduce the constitutive laws and the contact boundary conditions that will be employed throughout the book. Then, we describe the contact process with adhesion and introduce the constitutive models with damage. All the variables in this chapter are assumed to have a sufficient degree of smoothness so that all the necessary mathematical manipulations are justified. We assume the reader is familiar with basic notion of Mechanics of Continua. A partial list of relevant books and monographs is [38, 39, 53, 57, 69, 82,90, 121]. We refer the reader to [67, 68, 87, 98, 125] for more details of the modeling aspects of Contact Mechanics treated in this chapter.
