Quasistatic Electro-Elastic Contact Modeling Using the Boundary Element Method

A three-dimensional boundary element methodology to study frictionless indentation response of piezoelectric (PE) materials is presented. The boundary element method (BEM) is used in order to compute the electro-elastic influence coeffcients of fully anisotropic piezoelectric solids. The proposed contact formulation is based on the augmented Lagrangian method presented in [33, 34, 35] and makes it possible to consider piezoelectric materials under different mechanical and electrical boundary conditions (i.e. insulating indenter and conducting indenter). The methodology is validated by comparison with theoretical solutions presented in the literature.