The asymptotically sharp Korn interpolation and second inequalities for shells

Abstract

We consider shells in three dimensional Euclidean space which have bounded principal curvatures. We prove Korn's interpolation (or the so called first and a half\footnote{The inequality first introduced in [6]}) and second inequalities on that kind of shells for $\Bu\in W^{1,2}$ vector fields, imposing no boundary or normalization conditions on $\Bu.$ The constants in the estimates are optimal in terms of the asymptotics in the shell thickness $h,$ having the scalings $h$ or $O(1).$ The Korn interpolation inequality reduces the problem of deriving any linear Korn type estimate for shells to simply proving a Poincar\'e type estimate with the symmetrized gradient on the right hand side. In particular this applies to linear geometric rigidity estimates for shells, i.e., Korn's fist inequality without boundary conditions.