No Arabic abstract
We investigate the equilibrium configurations of closed planar elastic curves of fixed length, whose stiffness, also known as the bending rigidity, depends on an additional density variable. The underlying variational model relies on the minimization of a bending energy with respect to shape and density and can be considered as a one-dimensional analogue of the Canham-Helfrich model for heterogeneous biological membranes. We present a generalized Euler-Bernoulli elastica functional featuring a density-dependent stiffness coefficient. In order to treat the inherent nonconvexity of the problem we introduce an additional length scale in the model by means of a density gradient term. We derive the system of Euler-Lagrange equations and study the bifurcation structure of solutions with respect to the model parameters. Both analytical and numerical results are presented.
In this paper, we consider the $L^2$-gradient flow for the modified $p$-elastic energy defined on planar closed curves. We formulate a notion of weak solution for the flow and prove the existence of global-in-time weak solutions with $p ge 2$ for initial curves in the energy space via minimizing movements. Moreover, we prove the existence of unique global-in-time solutions to the flow with $p=2$ and obtain their subconvergence to an elastica as $t to infty$.
We study the recovery of piecewise analytic density and stiffness tensor of a three-dimensional domain from the local dynamical Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. We give global uniqueness results if the medium is transversely isotropic with known axis of symmetry or orthorhombic with known symmetry planes on each subdomain. We also obtain uniqueness of a fully anisotropic stiffness tensor, assuming that it is piecewise constant and that the interfaces which separate the subdomains have curved portions. The domain partition need not to be known. Precisely, we show that a domain partition consisting of subanalytic sets is simultaneously uniquely determined.
We have recently proposed an efficient computation method for the frictionless linear elastic axisymmetric contact of coated bodies [A. Perriot and E. Barthel, J. Mat. Res. 19 (2004) 600]. Here we give a brief description of the approach. We also discuss implications of the results for the instrumented indentation data analysis of coated materials. Emphasis is laid on incompressible or nearly incompressible materials (Poisson ratio $ u>0.4$): we show that the contact stiffness rises much more steeply with contact radius than for more compressible materials and significant elastic pile-up is evidenced. In addition the dependence of the penetration upon contact radius increasingly deviates from the homogeneous reference case when the Poisson ratio increases. As a result, this algorithm may be helpful in instrumented indentation data analysis on soft and nearly incompressible layers.
Ultrasound modulated bioluminescence tomography (UMBLT) is an imaging method which can be formulated as a hybrid inverse source problem. In the regime where light propagation is modeled by a radiative transfer equation, previous approaches to this problem require large numbers of optical measurements [10]. Here we propose an alternative solution for this inverse problem which requires only a single optical measurement in order to reconstruct the isotropic source. Specifically, we derive two inversion formulae based on Neumann series and Fredholm theory respectively, and prove their convergence under sufficient conditions. The resulting numerical algorithms are implemented and experimented to reconstruct both continuous and discontinuous sources in the presence of noise.
We study the singular perturbation of an elastic energy with a singular weight. The minimization of this energy results in a multi-scale pattern formation. We derive an energy scaling law in terms of the perturbation parameter and prove that, although one cannot expect periodicity of minimizers, the energy of a minimizer is uniformly distributed across the sample. Finally, following the approach developed by Alberti and M{u}ller in 2001 we prove that a sequence of minimizers of the perturbed energies converges to a Young measure supported on functions of slope $pm 1$ and of period depending on the location in the domain and the weights in the energy.