FE–BE coupling for a transmission problem involving microstructure

Abstract

We analyze a finite element/boundary element procedure for a non-convex contact problem for the double-well potential. After relaxing the associated functional, the degenerate minimization problem is reduced to a boundary/domain variational inequality, a discretized saddle point formulation of which may then be solved numerically. The convergence of the Galerkin approximations to certain macroscopic quantities and a corresponding a posteriori estimate for the approximation error are discussed. Numerical results illustrate the performance of the proposed method.