Singular perturbation by bending for an adhesive obstacle problem

Abstract

A free boundary problem arising from materials science is studied in one-dimensional case. The problem studied here is an obstacle problem for the non-convex energy consisting of a bending energy, tension and an adhesion energy. If the bending energy, which is a higher order term, is deleted then "edge" singularities of the solutions (surfaces) may occur at the free boundary as Alt-Caffarelli type variational problems. The main result of this paper is to give a singular limit of the energy utilizing the notion of $\Gamma$-convergence, when the bending energy can be regarded as a perturbation. This singular limit energy only depends on the state of surfaces at the free boundary as seen in singular perturbations for phase transition models.