A mathematical model for the third-body concept

The third-body concept is a pragmatic tool used to understand the friction and wear of sliding materials. The wear particles play a crucial role in this approach and constitute the main part of the third-body. This paper aims to introduce a mathematical model for the motion of a third-body interface separating two surfaces in contact. This model is written in accordance with the formalism of hysteresis operators as solution operators of the underlying variational inequalities. The existence result for this dynamical problem is obtained by using a priori estimates established for Faedo–Galerkin approximations, and some more specific techniques such as anisotropic Sobolev embedding theory.