Numerical computation of an inverse contact problem in elasticity

An inverse contact problem is a classical ill-posed problem in the sense of Hadamard. In this paper we develop a numerical computational method for solving an inverse contact problem in elasticity. Based on the Tikhonov regularization technique, we transform the original problem into an optimization problem so that a stable numerical approximation to the solution can be obtained by a standard finite element method. A convergence analysis on the proposed numerical algorithm is also given by a conditional stability estimate. © VSP 2006.