An Elastic Membrane With an Attached Non-Linear Thermoelastic Rod

We study a thermo-mechanical system consisting of an elastic membrane to which a shape-memory rod is glued. The slow movements of the membrane are controlled by the motions of the attached rods. A quasi-static model is used. We include the elastic feedback of the membrane on the rods. This results in investigating an elliptic boundary value problem in a domain W is subset R2 with a cut, coupled with non-linear equations for the vertical motions of the rod and the temperature on the rod. We prove the existence of a unique global weak solution to this problem using a fixed point argument.