On large deflections of viscoelastic plates

We shall deal with the system of von Karman equations describing great defl ections of thin plates. Most papers mainly from the 1960s and the 1970s are devoted to stationary nonlinear systems with elliptic main parts. We shall concentrate on viscoelastic plates modelled by a nonstationary pseudo-para bolic system in the case of short memory and by a system with a memory term in the long memory case. The Rothe's method converts the nonstationary pro blems to the sequence of stationary von Karman equations approximating weak solutions of the original problems (C) 1999 IMACS/Elsevier Science B.V. Al l rights reserved.