Mixed-hybrid and mixed-discontinuous Galerkin methods for linear dynamical elastic-viscoelastic composite structures

Abstract: We introduce and analyze a stress-based formulation for Zener's model in linear viscoelasticity. The method is aimed to tackle efficiently heterogeneous materials that admit purely elastic and viscoelastic parts in their composition. We write the mixed variational formulation of the problem in terms of a class of tensorial wave equation and obtain an energy estimate that guaranties the well-posedness of the problem through a standard Galerkin procedure. We propose and analyze mixed continuous and discontinuous Galerkin space discretizations of the problem and derive optimal error bounds for each semidiscrete solution in the corresponding energy norm.