Antiplane shear deformation of piezoelectric bodies in contact with a conductive support

We consider a mathematical model which describes the frictional contact between a piezoelectric body and an electrically conductive support. We model the material’s behavior with an electro-elastic constitutive law; the frictional contact is described with a boundary condition involving Clarke’s generalized gradient and the electrical condition on the contact surface is modelled using the subdifferential of a proper, convex and lower semicontinuous function. We derive a variational formulation of the model and then, using a fixed point theorem for set valued mappings, we prove the existence of at least one weak solution. Finally, the uniqueness of the solution is discussed; the investigation is based on arguments in the theory of variational-hemivariational inequalities.