BV SOLUTIONS AND RELAXATION LIMIT FOR A MODEL IN VISCOELASTICITY

Global existence of uniformly bounded BV entropy solutions to a 2 x 2 quasilinear system with relaxation, arising in viscoelasticity, is est ablished by using special fractional step versions of Godunov and Glim m schemes for arbitrarily large initial data. Thanks to the uniform es timates obtained, we prove the convergence of solutions to the corresp onding equilibrium limit as the relaxation parameter tends to zero.