Accepted Paper

Inserted: 16 dec 2010

Journal: Contin. Mech. Thermodyn.
Year: 2010

Abstract:

We study two variational models recently proposed in the literature to describe the mechanical behaviour of nematic elastomers either in the fully nonlinear regime or in the framework of a geometrically linear theory. We show that, in the small strain limit, the energy functional of the first one Gamma-converges to the relaxation of the second one, a functional for which an explicit representation formula is available.

Keywords: relaxation, elasticity, variational convergence, nematic elastomers

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