Dr. Alessandro Della Corte “On a variational problem describing  a nonlinear Timoshenko beam”

We study a variational problem  motivated by the investigation of deformations of Timoshenko beams under distributed load.The problem lives in the product space between Sobolev spaces of different regularity order, which poses interesting new questions. We prove existence and properties of the global minimizers as well as of a family of local minimizers, the latter with the help of a constrained-minimization technique backed up by a Gamma-convergence argument.