membrane shells
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<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper we show that the solution of an obstacle problem for linearly elastic elliptic membrane shells enjoys higher differentiability properties in the interior of the domain where it is defined.</p>

In this paper, we define, a priori, a natural two-dimensional Koiter’s model of a ‘general’ linearly elastic shell subject to a confinement condition. As expected, this model takes the form of variational inequalities posed over a non-empty closed convex subset of the function space used for the ‘unconstrained’ Koiter’s model. We then perform a rigorous asymptotic analysis as the thickness of the shell, considered a ‘small’ parameter, approaches zero, when the shell belongs to one of the three main classes of linearly elastic shells, namely elliptic membrane shells, generalized membrane shells and flexural shells. To illustrate the soundness of this model, we consider elliptic membrane shells to fix ideas. We then show that, in this case, the ‘limit’ model obtained in this fashion coincides with the two-dimensional ‘limit’ model obtained by means of another rigorous asymptotic analysis, but this time with the three-dimensional model of a ‘general’ linearly elastic shell subject to a confinement condition as a point of departure. In this fashion, our proposed Koiter’s model of a linearly elastic shell subject to a confinement condition is fully justified in this case, even though it is not itself a ‘limit’ model.

Wave propagation characteristics are determined for smart laminated fiber-reinforced composite cylindrical membrane shells with different piezoelectric coupling effects. Wave motion equations are derived using the membrane shell model. By solving an eigenvalue problem, dispersion curves of the wave motion are obtained for different axial and circumferential wave numbers. The effects of piezoelectric coupling, fiber orientation, stacking sequence, and material properties of the host shell on wave behaviors are investigated. The results of this paper can be used for studies on dynamic stability of piezoelectric coupled laminated fiber-reinforced composite shell structures and in design of smart structures with the piezoelectric materials for the applications of damage detection and structural health monitoring.

Our objective is to identify two-dimensional equations that model an obstacle problem for a linearly elastic elliptic membrane shell subjected to a confinement condition expressing that all the points of the admissible deformed configurations remain in a given half-space. To this end, we embed the shell into a family of linearly elastic elliptic membrane shells, all sharing the same middle surface [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is a domain in [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] is a smooth enough immersion, all subjected to this confinement condition, and whose thickness [Formula: see text] is considered as a “small” parameter approaching zero. We then identify, and justify by means of a rigorous asymptotic analysis as [Formula: see text] approaches zero, the corresponding “limit” two-dimensional variational problem. This problem takes the form of a set of variational inequalities posed over a convex subset of the space [Formula: see text]. The confinement condition considered here considerably departs from the Signorini condition usually considered in the existing literature, where only the “lower face” of the shell is required to remain above the “horizontal” plane. Such a confinement condition renders the asymptotic analysis substantially more difficult, however, as the constraint now bears on a vector field, the displacement vector field of the reference configuration, instead of on only a single component of this field.