Poroelastic effects have been of great interest in the seismic literature as they have been identified as a major cause of wave attenuation in heterogeneous porous media. The observed attenuation in the seismic wave can be explained in part by energy loss to fluid motion in the pores. On the other hand, it is known that the attenuation is particularly pronounced in stratified structures where the scale of spatial heterogeneity is much smaller than the seismic wavelength. Understanding of poroelastic effects on seismic wave attenuation in heterogeneous porous media has largely relied on numerical experiments. In this work, we present a homogenisation technique to obtain an upscaled viscoelastic model that captures seismic wave attenuation when the sub-seismic scale heterogeneity is periodic. The upscaled viscoelastic model directly relates seismic wave attenuation to the material properties of the heterogeneous structure. We verify our upscaled viscoelastic model against a full poroelastic model in numerical experiments. Our homogenisation technique suggests a new approach for solving coupled equations of motion.

A new class of history-dependent variational–hemivariational inequalities was recently studied in Migórski et al. (2015Nonlinear Anal. Ser. B: Real World Appl.22, 604–618). There, an existence and uniqueness result was proved and used in the study of a mathematical model which describes the contact between a viscoelastic body and an obstacle. The aim of this paper is to continue the analysis of the inequalities introduced in Migórski et al. (2015Nonlinear Anal. Ser. B: Real World Appl.22, 604–618) and to provide their numerical analysis. We start with a continuous dependence result. Then we introduce numerical schemes to solve the inequalities and derive error estimates. We apply the results to a quasistatic frictional contact problem in which the material is modelled with a viscoelastic constitutive law, the contact is given in the form of normal compliance, and friction is described with a total slip-dependent version of Coulomb's law.

The present paper represents a continuation of Sofonea and Matei's paper (Sofonea, M. and Matei, A. (2011) History-dependent quasivariational inequalities arising in contact mechanics. Eur. J. Appl. Math. 22, 471–491). There a new class of variational inequalities involving history-dependent operators was considered, an abstract existence and uniqueness result was proved and it was completed with a regularity result. Moreover, these results were used in the analysis of various frictional and frictionless models of contact. In this current paper we present a penalization method in the study of such inequalities. We start with an example which motivates our study; it concerns a mathematical model which describes the quasistatic contact between a viscoelastic body and a foundation; the material's behaviour is modelled with a constitutive law with long memory, the contact is frictionless and is modelled with a multivalued normal compliance condition and unilateral constraint. Then we introduce the abstract variational inequalities together with their penalizations. We prove the unique solvability of the penalized problems and the convergence of their solutions to the solution of the original problem, as the penalization parameter converges to zero. Finally, we turn back to our contact model, apply our abstract results in the study of this problem and provide their mechanical interpretation.