A convergence criterion for elliptic variational inequalities

We consider an elliptic variational inequality with unilateral constraints in a Hilbert space X which, under appropriate assumptions on the data, has a unique solution u. We formulate a convergence criterion to the solution u, i.e. we provide necessary and sufficient conditions on a sequence {un} ⊂ X which guarantee the convergence un → u in the space X. Then we illustrate the use of this criterion to recover well-known convergence results and well-posedness results in the sense of Tykhonov and Levitin–Polyak. We also provide two applications of our results, in the study of a heat transfer problem and an elastic frictionless contact problem, respectively.