Virtual Element Methods for Elliptic Variational Inequalities of the Second Kind

This paper is devoted to virtual element methods for solving elliptic variational inequalities (EVIs) of the second kind. First, a general framework is provided for the numerical solution of the EVIs and for its error analysis. Then virtual element methods are applied to solve two representative EVIs: a simplified friction problem and a frictional contact problem. Optimal order error estimates are derived for the virtual element solutions of the two representative EVIs, including the effects of numerical integration for the non-smooth term in the EVIs. A fast solver is introduced to solve the discrete problems. Several numerical examples are included to show the numerical performance of the proposed methods.