Existence of a Solution for a Nonlinearly Elastic Plane Membrane Subject to Plane Forces

The two-dimensional nonlinear ‘membrane’ equations for a plate made of a Saint Venant–Kirchhoff material have been justified by D. Fox, A. Raoult and J.C. Simo (1993) by means of the method of formal asymptotic expansions applied to the three-dimensional equations of nonlinear elasticity. This model, which retains the material-frame indifference of the original three dimensional problem in the sense that its energy density is invariant under the rotations of R³, is equivalent to finding the critical points of a functional whose nonlinear part depends on the first fundamental form of the unknown deformed surface. We establish here a local existence result for these equations in the case of the membrane subject to forces parallel to its plane and we give qualitative properties of the solutions found in this fashion in terms of injectivity and of minimization. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.