Variational analysis of a frictional contact problem with wear and damage

Abstract

We study a quasistatic problem describing the contact with friction and wear between a piezoelectric body and a moving foundation. The material is modeled by an electro-viscoelastic constitutive law with long memory and damage. The wear of the contact surface due to friction is taken into account and is described by the differential Archard condition. The contact is modeled with the normal compliance condition and the associated law of dry friction. We present a variational formulation of the problem and establish, under a smallness assumption on the data, the existence and uniqueness of the weak solution. The proof is based on arguments of parabolic evolutionary inequations, elliptic variational inequalities and Banach fixed point.

Keywords

• quasistatic process
• electro-viscoelastic materials
• damage
• normal compliance
• friction
• wear