An essay on deformation measures in isotropic thin shell theories. Bending versus curvature

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the consistency of extended Cosserat shell models with classical Koiter shell theory, emphasizing the importance of deformation measures related to bending and curvature.

Contribution

It provides a unified overview and comparison of strain measures in Cosserat shell models, highlighting their relation to classical bending and curvature measures.

Findings

New strain tensors generalize classical measures

All models align with well-known bending or curvature tensors

Clarifies the geometric interpretation of strain measures

Abstract

It has become commonplace for the stored energy function of any realistic shell model to align ``within first order" with the classical Koiter membrane-bending (flexural) shell model. In this paper, we assess whether certain extended Cosserat shell models are consistent with the classical linear Koiter model. In doing this, we observe that there are numerous reasons why a modified version of the classical Koiter model should be considered, a consensus reached not only by Koiter himself but also by Sanders and Budiansky, who independently developed the same theory during the same period. To provide a comprehensive overview of the strain measures employed in our Cosserat shell models, this paper presents them in a unified manner and compares them with the strain measures previously utilized in the literature. We show that all our new strain tensors either generalize (in the case of nonlinear constrained or unconstrained models) or coincide (in the case of the linear constrained model) with the strain tensors recognized as the ``best" or those possessing a well-defined geometric interpretation connected to bending or curvature.