A confinement problem for a linearly elastic Koiter's shell

Abstract In this Note, we propose a natural two-dimensional model of “Koiter's type” for a general linearly elastic shell confined in a half space. This model is governed by a set of variational inequalities posed over a non-empty closed and convex subset of the function space used for modeling the corresponding “unconstrained” Koiter's model. To study the limit behavior of the proposed model as the thickness of the shell, regarded as a small parameter, approaches zero, we perform a rigorous asymptotic analysis, distinguishing the cases where the shell is either an elliptic membrane shell, a generalized membrane shell of the first kind, or a flexural shell. Moreover, in the case where the shell is an elliptic membrane shell, we show that the limit model obtained via the asymptotic analysis of our proposed two-dimensional Koiter's model coincides with the limit model obtained via a rigorous asymptotic analysis of the corresponding three-dimensional “constrained” model.