A polynomial chaos approach to stochastic variational inequalities

Abstract

We consider stochastic elliptic variational inequalities of the second kind involving a bilinear form with stochastic diffusion coefficient. We prove existence and uniqueness of weak solutions, propose a stochastic Galerkin approximation of an equivalent parametric reformulation, and show equivalence to a related collocation method. Numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency of our approach and suggest similar error estimates as for linear elliptic problems.