On a nonsmooth fourth order boundary value problem

Existence of solutions of the following boundary value problem is investigated by a variational approach. u(iv) - au '' + bu epsilon (partial derivative) over barF(t, u), [GRAPHICS] Here, F(t, xi) : (0, 1) x R -> R is a Caratheodory mapping, locally Lipschitz with respect to the second variable, and (partial derivative) over barF(t, xi) denotes the generalized Clarke gradient of FF(t, xi) with respect to xi, while j is assumed to be a proper, convex, lower semicontinuous function whose subdifferential is denoted by partial derivative j. This problem is a model for real beam/shell applications. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.