On the characterization of drilling rotation in the 6-parameter resultant shell theory

Abstract We analyze geometrically non-linear isotropic elastic shells and prove the existence of minimizers. In general, the model takes into account the effect of drilling rotations in shells. For the special case of shells without drilling rotations we present a representation theorem for the strain energy function

Existence theorems in the geometrically non-linear 6-parametric theory of elastic plates

In this paper we show the existence of global minimizers for the geometrically exact, non-linear equations of elastic plates, in the framework of the general 6-parametric shell theory. A characteristic feature of this model for shells is the appearance of two independent kinematic fields: the translation vector field and the rotation tensor field (representing in total 6 independent scalar kinematic variables). For isotropic plates, we prove the existence theorem by applying the direct methods of the calculus of variations. Then, we generalize our existence result to the case of anisotropic plates. We also present a detailed comparison with a previously established Cosserat plate model.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur