Energy Methods in Continuum Mechanics

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop Energy Methods for Free Boundary Problems in Continuum Mechanics, held in Oviedo, Spain, from March 21 to March 23, 1994. It is well known that the conservation laws and the constitutive equations of Continuum Mechanics lead to complicated coupled systems of partial differential equations to which, as a rule, one fails to apply the techniques usually employed in the studies of scalar uncoupled equations such as, for instance, the maximum principle. The study of the qualitative behaviour of solutions of the systems re­ quires different techniques, among others, the so called, Energy Methods where the properties of some integral of a nonnegative function of one or several unknowns allow one to arrive at important conclusions on the envolved unknowns. This vol­ ume presents the state of the art in such a technique. A special attention is paid to the class of Free Boundary Problems. The organizers are pleased to thank the European Science Foundation (Pro­ gram on Mathematical treatment of free boundary problems), the DGICYT (Spain), the FICYT (Principado de Asturias, Spain) and the Universities of Oviedo and Complutense de Madrid for their generous financial support. Finally, we wish to thank Kluwer Academic Publishers for the facilities received for the publication of these Proceedings.