A Dynamic Piezoelectric Contact Problem

We consider a mathematical model, which describes the dynamic process of contact between a piezoelectric body and an electrically conductive foundation. The material's behavior is modeled with a nonlinear electro-viscoelastic constitutive law; the contact is frictionless and is described with the normal compliance condition and a regularized electrical conductivity condition. We state the variational formulation for the problem, and then we introduce a fully discrete scheme, based on the finite element method to approximate the spatial variable and the backward Euler scheme to discretize the time derivatives. We implement this scheme in a numerical code and, in order to verify its accuracy, we present numerical simulations in the study of a two-dimensional test problem.