Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2002
The purpose of this paper is to study a control bycoefficients problem issued from the elastohydrodynamic lubrication. Thecontrol variable is the film thickness.The cavitation phenomenon takes placeand described by the Elrod-Adams model, suggested in preference to theclassical variational inequality due to its ability to describe input andoutput flow.The idea is to use the penalization in the state equation byapproximating the Heaviside graph whith a sequence of monotone and regularfunctions. We derive a necessary condition for the regularized problem, thenwe establish estimates of the state and the adjoint state in the onedimensional case. Next we pass to the limit.