This talk is devoted to the analysis of rate-independent processes in
visco-elastic materials in a general framework. A suitable notion of solution is
discussed and an abstract
existence theorem is presented. Particular attention is paid to stability results
based on
variational convergence in the spirit of Gamma-convergence of rate-independent
processes.
For the visco-elastic setting, however, it turns out that Gamma-convergence is not
enough,
but rather Mosco-convergence is needed. The abstract results are substantiated with
problems from applications,
such as damage, delamination, and plasticity.