Global Existence for Rate-Independent Gradient Plasticity at Finite Strain

We provide a global existence result for the time-continuous elastoplasticity problem using the energetic formulation. For this we show that the geometric nonlinearities via the multiplicative decomposition of the strain can be controlled via polyconvexity and a priori stress bounds in terms of the energy density. While temporal oscillations are controlled via the energy dissipation the spatial compactness is obtain via the regularizing terms involving gradients of the internal variables.