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The differential equations that govern the equilibrium of an elastic shell occupying a surface in the three-dimensional Euclidean points space are:
Here and are two tensor fields, is a vector field, is a tangential vector field, and is the normal unit vector field. In addition, is the orthogonal projector to the tangent space. Furthermore, is the divergence of , which we can define using a chart by
where is the contravariant basis. Moreover, the surface divergence of is
Given a point , the vectors and are, respectively, the force and the couple per unit area of applied at . The fact that the couple is orthogonal to encodes the assumption that a shell cannot sustain couples parallel to its normal. Moreover, is a linear map from (the tangent space at ) to the space of three-dimensional vectors, while maps linearly into itself. These tensor have the following intepretation. Given a tangential vector at a point , and are, respectively, the internal force and the internal couple per unit length transmitted across a line element orthogonal to .
The equilibrium equations are a consequence of the Euler Axioms, which state that, given any part , the resultant force and the resultant moment acting on must vanish:
(Here is the position with respect to the origin.) Such consequence can be drawn by the application of the divergence identity
combined with a standard localization argument. Another consequence of is that and must obey
On denoting by the normal vector , and using the component representation, we can write
Then the equilibrium equations can be written as follows
Moreover, the symmetry condition reads
where is the alternating symbol and are the mixed components of the Weingarten tensor.
Within the linear theory, a change of the configuration of the shell is described by a displacement field and by a rotation field (a tangential field). Their interpretation is as follows: after the deformation a material fiber parallel to at occupies the position , moreover, in the deformed configuration the fiber is parallel to the vector .
Consider now a pair and of a virtual displacement and rotation. The virtual work performed by the forces and the couples (both external and internal) acting on a part is:
Integration by parts by making use of the divergence theorem and of the equilibrium equations shows that
Introducing the decomposition
and observing that is a tangential tensor, we can write
where is the covariant derivative.
Rigid displacements have the form
where is a translation vector and is a rotation vector. For a rigid displacement,
where is the skew-symmetric tensor whose axial vector is . Note that the shear vector
is tangential and has the property that it vanishes for a rigid virtual displacement. However, the tensors and although being tangential, do not have the latter property. Thus, we cannot take them as strain measures. However, we can rewrite the internal work as
For a rigid motion , hence , and . Thus, under a rigid motion the quantity vanishes. Furthermore since is symmetric, then
Note that also vanishes when is an infinitesimal rigid displacement. This and the previous results suggest that we adopt
as additional strain measures, so that the virtual work reads
The statement that
holds for every virtual displacement and for every part bears the name of Principle of Virtual Work. In particular, if we take to be the entire shell , then
where and are the forces and moments imposed on the boundary of the shell.
Note that since maps into itself, we have
where we have introduced the decomposition of the displacement into its tangential and normal components
Notice also that, since , we have
Hence, given that is symmetric,
An unshearable shell obeys the internal constraint , which yields
In this case,
The internal work reduces to
For an unshearable shell, the shear vector is constitutively indetermined, thus it must be ruled out from the equilibrium equations. To this effect, we decompose the surface force into its tangential and normal part:
and we write the equilibrium equations as:
Here is the divergence of . Then we combine the last two equations to obtain a pair of equations in pure form:
The expression of the internal work suggest a constitutive equation for the strain energy that is quadratic and separable, in the sense that it has the form
where is an isotropic fourth-order tensor:
The time derivative of the strain energy is
where
On taking into account the expression for the internal work, the dissipation principle writes:
This suggests the constitutive equations
Notice that the shear vector is constitutively undetermined. Hence, to obtain equilibrium equations in pure form we must combine
According to Ciarlet [4], the strain energy of a part of a linear Koiter shell is
where
The time derivative of the strain energy is
The dissipation principle yields
In particular, we have the constitutive equations
Additional details and references can be found here).