This work, motivated by the rapid developments in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) structures, especially actuators and grippers, analyses the dynamics of a thermo-mechanical system consisting of a horizontal beam joined at one end to a vertical rod. As a result of thermal expansion or vibration of the rod, the other end may come into contact with another part of the MEMS device and that closes an electrical circuit, which is the actuating or switching function of such a beam–rod system. The interaction between the rod's contacting end and the supporting device is described by a normal compliance contact law for the displacements and by an inclusion-type Barber's heat exchange condition for the temperature. The heat-exchange coefficient is a multi-function taking into account the air resistance in the gap when there is no contact and the contact pressure when contact occurs. The model consists of a nonlinear variational inclusion for the temperature coupled with a nonlinear variational equation for the displacements. The existence of a weak solution to the problem is proved by using the Galerkin method, a regularization of Barber's condition with the Yosida approximation of a maximal monotone operator, and a priori estimates.

We consider the split common null point problem in Hilbert space. We introduce and study a shrinking projection method for finding a solution using the resolvent of a maximal monotone operator and prove a strong convergence theorem for the algorithm.

We construct a sequence {An} of maximal monotone operators with a common domain and converging, uniformly on bounded subsets, to another maximal monotone operator A; however, the sequence {t−1nAn} fails to graph-converge for some null sequence {tn}.