The modeling and numerical analysis of wrinkled membranes

In this paper three fundamental issues regarding modeling and analysis of wrinkled membranes are addressed. First, a new membrane model with viable Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio is proposed, which physically characterizes stress relaxation phenomena in membrane wrinkling, and expresses taut, wrinkled and slack states of a membrane in a systematic manner. Second, a parametric variational principle is developed for the new membrane model. Third, by the variational principle, the original membrane problem is converted to a non-linear complementarity problem in mathematical programming. A parametric finite element discretization and a smoothing Newton method are then used for numerical solution. The proposed membrane model and numerical method are capable of delivering convergent results for membranes with a mixture of wrinkled and slack regions, without iteration of membrane stresses. Three numerical examples are provided. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.