Quintic splines solutions of a class of contact problems (Q918146)

It is shown that a class of contact problems describing the configuration equilibrium of an elastic beam can be studied in the general framework of variational inequalities. A variational inequality is characterized by a sequence of boundary value problems using the technique of \textit{H. Lewy} and \textit{G. Stampacchia} [Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 22, 153-188 (1969; Zbl 0172.388)]. The numerical solution is obtained by use of the collocation method with quintic B-splines. Numerical results are given for the one-dimensional obstacle problem (elastic string and elastic obstacle).