Dynamic frictionless contact in linear viscoelasticity

David E. StewartDepartment of Mathematics, University of Iowa, Iowa, IA 52242, USA ^{In this work, we formulate a dynamic frictionless contact problemwith linear viscoelasticity of Kelvin–Voigt type, basedon the Signorini contact conditions. We show existence of solutions,and investigate the possibility for obtaining an energy balance.Employing time discretization and the finite-element method,we compute numerical solutions. Our numerical scheme is implementedwith non-smooth Newton's method which solves the complementarityproblem. The numerical results support the idea that the energylosses in the limit of the numerical solution are equal to thelosses due to viscosity.}