Analysis of a quasistatic contact problem for piezoelectric materials (Q549806)

The paper presents a mathematical model describing the frictional contacts between a piezoelectric body and an electrically conductive foundation. The process is quasistatic, the material behavior is modeled with an electro-viscoelastic constitutive law, and the contact is described by subdifferential boundary condition. A variational formulation of the problem is derived, which has the form of a system involving two history-dependent hemivariational inequalities, in which the unknowns are the velocity and the electric potential field. The main result is the proof of the existence of a unique weak solution to the model.