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Gradient polyconvexity and modeling of shape memory alloys
We show existence of an energetic solution to a model of shape memory alloys in which the elastic energy is described by means of a gradient-polyconvex functional. This allows us to show existence of a solution based on weak continuity of nonlinear minors of deformation gradients in Sobolev spaces. Admissible deformations do not necessarily have integrable second derivatives. Under suitable assumptions, our model allows for solutions which are orientation-preserving and globally injective everywhere in the domain representing the specimen. Theoretical results are supported by three-dimensional computational examples. This work is an extended version of [36].
A class of minimum principles for characterizing the trajectories and the relaxation of dissipative systems
This work is concerned with the reformulation of evolutionary problems in a weak form enabling consideration of solutions that may exhibit evolving microstructures. This reformulation is accomplished by expressing the evolutionary problem in variational form, i.e., by identifying a functional whose minimizers represent entire trajectories of the system. The particular class of functionals under consideration is derived by first defining a sequence of time-discretized minimum problems and subsequently formally passing to the limit of continuous time. The resulting functionals may be regarded as elliptic regularizations of the original evolutionary problem. We find that the $Gamma$-limits of interest are highly degenerate and provide limited information regarding the limiting trajectories of the system. Instead we seek to characterize the minimizing trajectories directly. The special class of problems characterized by a rate-independent dissipation functional is amenable to a particularly illuminating analysis. For these systems it is possible to derive a priori bounds that are independent of the regularizing parameter, whence it is possible to extract convergent subsequences and find the limiting trajectories. Under general assumptions on the functionals, we show that all such limits satisfy the energetic formulation (S) & (E) for rate-independent systems. Moreover, we show that the accumulation points of the regularized solutions solve the associated limiting energetic formulation.