Stability of slender bodies under compression and validity of the von Kármán theory (Q834767)

In the article [\textit{G. Friesecke} and \textit{R. D. James}, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 180, No.~2, 183--236 (2006; Zbl 1100.74039)] it has been shown that the von Kármán (vK) functional, whose Euler-Lagrange equations are the vK equations, arises as a \(\Gamma\)-limit of nonlinear three-dimensional elasticity if the energy admits volume scales like thickness \(h\) to the fourth power. In this article boundary conditions are not discussed in detail to keep the exposition simple, and only normal loads are considered. To understand to what extent the vK equations can capture instability phenomena such as buckling, it is, however, crucial to include boundary conditions and in-plane loads; that is done here. The first main result is the following stability alternative: either the load is strong enough to cause a nontrivial deformation (of order one) in the nonlinear bending theory of plates, first proposed by Kirchhoff (`nonlinear instability'), or the load leads to an instability in a geometrically linear version of Kirchhoff's theory (`nonlinearized instability'), or the vK theory applies (and the deformations are of order \(h^2\) in plane and of order \(h\) out-of-plane). The different regimes can be related to different scalings of the energy \(e^h\) per unit volume as a function of the thickness: nonlinear instability corresponds to \(e^h\sim h^2\), linearized instability to \(h^4 \ll e^h \ll h^2\), and the vK regime is characterized by \(e^h\sim h^4\). The second result shows that failure of linear and nonlinear stability occurs at the same critical load, at least if the region where the body is clamped is connected. The third results asserts that the linearized stability is closely related to the existence of minimizers of the vK energy. For homogeneous boundary conditions (that is, zero out-of-plane displacements) it is shown that the infimum of the vK energy is \(-\infty\) if and only if the load exceeds the critical load for linearized stability. It is also shown that the vK functional captures well the asymptotic behaviour of three-dimensional minimizers until a critical load is reached. This critical load can be characterized by three equivalent conditions: linearized instability, nonlinear instability, and inf \(J^{\text{vK}}=-\infty\).