A Quasistatic Electro-Viscoelastic Contact Problem with Adhesion.

The aim of this paper is to study the process of contact with adhesion between a piezoelectric body and an obstacle, the so-called foundation. The material's behavior is assumed to be electro-viscoelastic; the process is quasistatic, the contact is modeled by the Signorini condition. The adhesion process is modeled by a bonding field on the contact surface. We derive a variational formulation for the problem and then we prove the existence of a unique weak solution to the model. The proof is based on a general result on evolution equations with maximal monotone operators and fixed-point arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]