Gamma-limit of a model for the elastic energy of an inextensible ribbon

Methods involving semicontinuity and convergence; relaxation (49J45) Variational principles of physics (49S05) Homogenization in equilibrium problems of solid mechanics (74Q05)

Abstract: A Gamma-convergence result involving the elastic energy of a narrow inextensible ribbon is established. A non-dimensional form of the elastic energy is reduced to a one-dimensional integral over the centerline of the ribbon with the aspect ratio of the ribbon being a small parameter. That integral is observed to increase monotonically with the aspect ratio. The Gamma-limit of the family of non-dimensional elastic energies is taken in a Sobolev space of centerlines with non-vanishing curvature. In that space, it is shown that the Gamma-limit is a functional first proposed by Sadowsky in the context of narrow ribbons that form M"{o}bius bands. The results obtained here do not apply to such ribbons, since the centerline of a M"{o}bius band must have at least one inflection point. As a first step toward dealing with such inflection points, a result is presented on the lower semicontinuity of the Sadowsky functional with inflection points comprising a set of measure zero within the domain of an arclength parameterization.

Review text

The authors describe a homogenization result for the elastic energy of an inextensible ribbon modeled as a 2D surface which is geometrically constrained to be isometric to a rectangle of length \(\mathcal{\ell }\) and width \(2\omega \). They define \(\varepsilon =\frac{2\omega }{\ell }\) and introducing the centerline \(\mathbf{r}\) they consider the unit speed parametrization \(\mathbf{u}:[0,1]\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{3}\) defined through \(\mathbf{u}(s)=\mathbf{r}(\ell s)/\ell \) and the nondimensionalized energy \[ \mathcal{F}_{\varepsilon }(u,V)= \begin{cases} \int_{V}\kappa ^{2}(1+\eta ^{2})^{2}g(\varepsilon \eta ^{\prime })ds & \text{ if }\mathbf{u}\in W^{3,p}(0,1;\mathbb{R}^{3})\text{, }\eta \in W^{1,1}(0,1), \\ +\infty & \text{otherwise,} \end{cases} \] where \(\kappa \) (resp. \(\tau \) and \(\eta \)) are the dimensionless curvature \(\kappa =|\mathbf{u}^{\prime \prime }|\) (resp. torsion \(\tau =\frac{\mathbf{u }^{\prime }\cdot (\mathbf{u}^{\prime \prime }\times \mathbf{u}^{\prime \prime \prime })}{|\mathbf{u}^{\prime \prime }|^{2}}\) and ratio between curvature and torsion \(\eta =\frac{\mathbf{u}^{\prime }\cdot (\mathbf{u} ^{\prime \prime }\times \mathbf{u}^{\prime \prime \prime })}{|\mathbf{u} ^{\prime \prime }|^{3}}\)). In the definition of \(\mathcal{F}_{\varepsilon }(u,V)\), \(g\) is defined through \[ g(x)=\begin{cases} 1 & \text{if }x=0, \\ \frac{1}{x}\ln (\frac{2+x}{2-x}) & \text{if }|x|<2\text{ and }x\neq 0, \\ +\infty & \text{if }|x|\geq 2. \end{cases} \] The main result of the paper proves that for every \(p\geq 4\), \(\mathcal{F} _{\varepsilon }(\cdot ,(0,1))\) \(\Gamma \)-converges in the sequential weak topology of \(W^{3,p}(0,1;\mathbb{R}^{3})\) to \(\mathcal{F}(\cdot ,(0,1))\) defined through \[ \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{u},(0,1))=\int_{0}^{1}\kappa ^{2}(1+\eta ^{2})^{2}ds \] where \(X^{\kappa _{m},p}\) is the closure of \(\{\mathbf{u}\in C^{\infty }([0,1];\mathbb{R}^{3}):|\mathbf{u}^{\prime }(s)|=1\); \(|\mathbf{u}^{\prime \prime }(s)|\geq \kappa _{m}\) in \((0,1)\}\) with respect to the norm of \( W^{3,p}(0,1;\mathbb{R}^{3})\). The authors first recall some properties of the \(\Gamma \)-convergence and of sequentially weakly lower semicontinuous functionals, having in mind the Sadowsky functional \(f\) defined on \(\mathbb{R }^{9}\times \mathbb{R}^{9}\) through \(f(U,P)=(\frac{\alpha (\kappa _{m}^{-1}| \mathbf{u}_{2}|)}{\kappa _{m}})^{2}(|\mathbf{p}_{2}|^{2}+\alpha (|\mathbf{u} _{1}|)^{2}(\frac{\alpha (\kappa _{m}^{-1}|\mathbf{u}_{2}|)}{\kappa _{m}} )^{4}[\mathbf{u}_{1}\cdot (\mathbf{u}_{2}\times \mathbf{p}_{3})]^{2})^{2}\). They write the limit functional \(\mathcal{F}(\mathbf{u},(0,1))\) in terms of the Sadowsky functional \(f\).

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