The plane-strain formulation for the steady-state closure of a near-rectangular, single isolated opening in an indefinite viscoelastic medium is presented. A power creep law describes the creep behavior of the viscous medium. Because of the highly nonlinear nature of the creep, an analytic solution is not possible for the proposed opening geometry, hence an approximation method based upon the minimum principle for velocities is used. The analytic function is used to describe the shape of opening (circular, elliptical, and rectangular with rounded corners).

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