This work is concerned with the reformulation of evolutionary problems in a weak form enabling consideration of solutions that may exhibit evolving microstructures. This reformulation is accomplished by expressing the evolutionary problem in variational form, i.e., by identifying a functional whose minimizers represent entire trajectories of the system. The particular class of functionals under consideration is derived by first defining a sequence of time-discretized minimum problems and subsequently...

This work is concerned with the reformulation of evolutionary problems in a weak form enabling consideration of solutions that may exhibit evolving microstructures. This reformulation is accomplished by expressing the evolutionary problem in variational form, i.e., by identifying a functional whose minimizers represent entire trajectories of the system. The particular class of functionals under consideration is derived by first defining a sequence of time-discretized minimum problems and...

A conceptual numerical strategy for rate-independent processes in the energetic formulation is proposed and its convergence is proved under various rather mild data qualifications. The novelty is that we obtain convergence of subsequences of space-time discretizations even in case where the limit problem does not have a unique solution and we need no additional assumptions on higher regularity of the limit solution. The variety of general perspectives thus obtained is illustrated on several...