Stress state of hinged supported thin-wall elastic structures

Invertibility and noninvertibility in thin elastic structures

The nonlinear elastic energy of a thin film of thickness h is given by a functional E. Friesecke, James and Müller derived the Γ-limits, as h → 0, of the functionals hE for α ≥ 3. In this article we study the invertibility properties of almost minimizers of these functionals, and more generally of sequences with equiintegrable energy density. We show that they are invertible almost everywhere a...

Innovative Elastic Thin-Film Solar Cell Structures

The elastic mechanical response of supported thin polymer films.

Nanoindentation studies of the mechanical properties of sufficiently thin polymer films, supported by stiff substrates, indicate that the mechanical moduli are generally higher than those of the bulk. This enhancement of the effective modulus, in the thickness range of few hundred nanometers, is indicated to be associated with the propagation and impingement of the indentation tip induced stres...

Shape morphing hinged truss structures

Truss structures are widely used for the support of structural loads in applications where minimum mass solutions are required. Their nodes are normally constructed to resist rotation to maximize their stiffness under load. A multi-link node concept has recently been proposed that permits independent rotation of tetrahedral trusses linked by such a joint. High authority shape morphing truss str...

Homogenization of Elastic Thin Structures: A Measure-Fattening Approach

We study the homogenization of vector problems on thin periodic structures in IR. The analysis is carried out within the same measure framework that we previously enforced in [4] for scalar problems, namely each periodic, low-dimensional structure is identified with the overlying positive Radon measure μ. Thus, we deal with a sequence of measures {με}, whose periodicity cell has size ε convergi...