Quasiconvexification in <i>W</i>^1,1 and Optimal Jump Microstructure in <i>BV</i> Relaxation (Q4389044)

The paper deals with the characterization of the relaxed functional associated to the energy \[ E(u)= \int_\Omega W(\nabla u)dx+{\mathcal H}^{N- 1}(S(u)),\tag{1} \] where \(u\in\text{SBV}(\Omega; \mathbb{R}^p)\) (the space of special BV functions, whose distributional gradients have a zero Cantor part), \(W\) is a nonnegative continuous function, \({\mathcal H}^{N-1}\) is the \(N-1\)-dimensional Hausdorff measure, and \(\nabla u\), \(S(u)\), respectively, denote the absolutely continuous part of the measure \(Du\) with respect to the Lebesgue measure and the ``jump set'' of \(u\). The functional \(E(u)\) is involved in several models of fracture mechanics; indeed if \(W(u)\) represents the deformation field, then the energy density \(W\) penalizes the elastic deformation, while the term \({\mathcal H}^{N-1}(S(u))\) is the feature penalization by its size. The lower semicontinuity and relaxation of functionals of the form (1) have been studied in the literature under various assumptions on the function \(W\). Here, the main feature consists in the fact that \(W\) is a function with a linear growth at infinity, which gives the relaxation formula for the lower semicontinuous envelope: \[ \overline E(u)= \int_\Omega QW(\nabla u)dx+ \int_\Omega (QW)^\infty(dC(u))+ \int_{S(u)} h_W([u], \nu)d{\mathcal H}^{N- 1}. \] Here \(QW\) is the quasiconvexification of \(W\), \((QW)^\infty\) is the recession function of \(QW\), \(h_W\) is a suitable integrand which can be computed from \(W\), and \([u]\), \(\nu\), respectively, denote the jump of \(u\) and the normal vector to \(S(u)\).