Derivation of nonlinear shell models combining shear and flexure: application to biological membranes

International audienceBiological membranes are often idealized as incompressible elastic surfaces whose strain energy only depends on their mean curvature and pos-sibly on their shear. We show that this type of model can be derived using a formal asymptotic method by considering biological membranes to be thin, strongly anisotropic, elastic, locally homogeneous bodies