  The paper studies the initial boundary value problem related to the dynamic
evolution of an elastic beam interacting with a substrate through an
elastic-breakable forcing term. This discontinuous interaction is aimed to
model the phenomenon of attachement-detachement of the beam occurring in
adhesion phenomena. We prove existence of solutions in energy space and exhibit
various counterexamples to uniqueness. Furthermore we characterize some
relavant features of the solutions, ruling the main effectes of the
nonlinearity due to the elasic-breakable term on the dynamical evolution, by
proving the linearization property according to \cite{G96} and an asymtotic
result pertaining the long time behavior.
