Analysis of partly wrinkled membranes by the method of dynamic relaxation (Q1344150)

A version of the method of dynamic relaxation is developed to analyze equilibrium configurations of partly wrinkled membranes. In this method equilibria are regarded as long time limits of a damped dynamical problem. The membrane theory considered is based on the concept of a relaxed strain energy function that automatically incorporates the effects of wrinkling. For neo-Hookean materials, existence theorems of nonlinear elasticity are used to show that the relaxed potential energy possesses minimizers in a certain function space. Several examples of two- and three-dimensional deformations are presented.