Cohesive zone-type delamination in visco-elasticity

We study a model for the rate-independent evolution of cohesive zone delamination in a visco-elastic solid, also exposed to dynamics effects. The main feature of this model, inspired by [32], is that the surface energy related to the crack opening depends on the history of the crack separation between the two sides of the crack path, and allows for different responses upon loading and unloading. Due to the presence of multivalued and unbounded operators featuring non-penetration and the `memory'-constraint in the strong formulation of the problem, we prove existence of a weaker notion of solution, known as \emph{semistable energetic solution}, pioneered in [41] and refined in [38].