On lower semicontinuity of integral functionals in \(LD(\Omega)\) (Q1408588)

The author proves the lower semicontinuity of the functional \(F(u)=\int_{\Omega }f( \mathcal{E}( u)) dx\), where \(\mathcal{E}( u)\) denotes the symmetric linearized deformation tensor \(\mathcal{E}( u)=(\nabla u+\nabla u^{T})/2\), under some hypotheses on the Borel function \(f\) defined on the space \(M_{s}^{n\times n}\) of symmetric \(n\times n\) matrices. Apart from the natural inequalities: \(C_{1}\|A\|-C_{2}\leq f( A) \leq C_{3}( \|A\|+1)\), the author imposes that \(f\) is ``symmetric quasi-convex'', which means that \(f\circ \pi \) is quasi-convex in the sense of \textit{C. B. Morrey jun.} [``Multiple integrals in the calculus of variations.'' (1966; Zbl 0142.38701)], where \(\pi \) is the projection operator from \(M^{n\times n}\) on \(M_{s}^{n\times n}\). Under these hypotheses, the author proves that the energy functional \(F\) is lower semicontinuous on the subspace \(LD(\Omega)\) of all functions in \(L^{1}(\Omega,\mathbf{R}^{n})\) having a deformation tensor in \(M_{b}( \Omega,M_{s}^{n\times n}) \) without any singular part. The last part of this work presents the notion of symmetric quasi-convex envelope and describes an example where this symmetric quasi-convex envelope is not a convex function. This contribution follows a long series of works dealing with the lower semicontinuity properties of energy functionals, hence with the existence of equilibrium configurations for elastic or elasto-plastic materials.