The propagation of fractures in a solid undergoing cyclic loadings
is known as the fatigue phenomenon. In this paper, we present a time continuous
model for fatigue, in the special situation of the debonding of thin layers,
coming from a time discretized version recently proposed by
Jaubert and Marigo [C. R. Mecanique333 (2005) 550–556].
Under very general assumptions on the surface energy density and
on the applied displacement, we discuss the well-posedness of our
problem and we give the main properties of the evolution process.