Wei-jun Tang ¹, Hong-yuan Fu ¹, Long-jun Shen ¹

In this paper, a exterior Signorini problem is reduced to a variational inequality on a bounded inner region with the help of a coupling of boundary integral and finite element methods. We established a equivalence between the original exterior Signorini problem and the variational inequality on the bounded inner region coupled with two integral equations on an auxiliary boundary. We also introduce a finite element approximation of the variational inequality and a boundary element approximation of the integral equations. Furthermore, the optimal error estimates are given.

Key words: Boundary element; finite element; Signorini problems.