arXiv subjects

Ian Tobasco

Publications and source records attributed to Ian Tobasco.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Variational derivation of the Flamant solution for a nonlinear elastic wedge

Concentrated forces acting at the tip of a two-dimensional wedge give rise to the classical Flamant solution to linear elasticity, whose displacement and strain are singular at the tip of the wedge. Starting from nonlinear elasticity, we prove that the Flamant solution gives the leading order response of a slightly truncated wedge to small boundary displacements or loads. This asymptotic result holds for general hyperelastic energies with super-quadratic growth at infinity; it also holds in the borderline case of quadratic growth at infinity, so long as the tip of the wedge is subjected to small enough displacements or loads. A main point of the proof is to restore compactness to low-energy sequences. We do so by applying a logarithmic change of variables sufficiently far from the tip. To justify this change of variables, we prove a geometric rigidity inequality in $L^p$ for truncated wedge domains with a constant that is uniform in the truncation length. This follows from the bi-Lipschitz invariance of the constant in the $L^p$ Friesecke--James--M\"uller inequality. Using this change of variables, we derive an asymptotic variational principle characterizing the Flamant solution in the singular limit of an ideal wedge.

math.AP↗

arXiv2025

Derivation of an effective plate theory for parallelogram origami from bar and hinge elasticity

Periodic origami patterns made with repeating unit cells of creases and panels bend and twist in complex ways. In principle, such soft modes of deformation admit a simplified asymptotic description in the limit of a large number of cells. Starting from a bar and hinge model for the elastic energy of a generic four parallelogram panel origami pattern, we derive a complete set of geometric compatibility conditions identifying the pattern's soft modes in this limit. The compatibility equations form a system of partial differential equations constraining the actuation of the origami's creases (a scalar angle field) and the relative rotations of its unit cells (a pair of skew tensor fields). We show that every solution of the compatibility equations is the limit of a sequence of soft modes -- origami deformations with finite bending energy and negligible stretching. Using these sequences, we derive a plate-like theory for parallelogram origami patterns with an explicit coarse-grained quadratic energy depending on the gradient of the crease-actuation and the relative rotations of the cells. Finally, we illustrate our theory in the context of two well-known origami designs: the Miura and Eggbox patterns. Though these patterns are distinguished in their anticlastic and synclastic bending responses, they show a universal twisting response. General soft modes captured by our theory involve a rich nonlinear interplay between actuation, bending and twisting, determined by the underlying crease geometry.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2024

Sharpness and non-sharpness of occupation measure bounds for integral variational problems

We analyze two recently proposed methods to establish a priori lower bounds on the minimum of general integral variational problems. The methods, which involve either `occupation measures' or a `pointwise dual relaxation' procedure, are shown to produce the same lower bound under a coercivity hypothesis ensuring their strong duality. We then show by a minimax argument that the methods actually evaluate the minimum for classes of one-dimensional, scalar-valued, or convex multidimensional problems. For generic problems, however, these methods should fail to capture the minimum and produce non-sharp lower bounds. We demonstrate this using two examples, the first of which is one-dimensional and scalar-valued with a non-convex constraint, and the second of which is multidimensional and non-convex in a different way. The latter example emphasizes the existence in multiple dimensions of nonlinear constraints on gradient fields that are ignored by occupation measures, but are built into the finer theory of gradient Young measures.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

Modelling planar kirigami metamaterials as generalized elastic continua

Kirigami metamaterials dramatically change their shape through a coordinated motion of nearly rigid panels and flexible slits. Here, we study a model system for mechanism-based planar kirigami featuring periodic patterns of quadrilateral panels and rhombi slits, with the goal of predicting their engineering scale response to a broad range of loads. We develop a generalized continuum model based on the kirigami's effective (cell-averaged) nonlinear deformation, along with its slit actuation and gradients thereof. The model accounts for three sources of elasticity: a strong preference for the effective fields to match those of a local mechanism, inter-panel stresses arising from gradients in slit actuation, and distributed hinge bending. We provide a finite-element formulation of this model and implement it using the commercial software Abaqus. Simulations of the model agree quantitatively with experiments across designs and loading conditions.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2023

Exact solutions for the wrinkle patterns of confined elastic shells

Complex textured surfaces occur in nature and industry, from fingerprints to lithography-based micropatterns. Wrinkling by confinement to an incompatible substrate is an attractive way of generating reconfigurable patterned topographies, but controlling the often asymmetric and apparently stochastic wrinkles that result remains an elusive goal. Here, we describe a new approach to understanding the wrinkles of confined elastic shells, using a Lagrange multiplier in place of stress. Our theory reveals a simple set of geometric rules predicting the emergence and layout of orderly wrinkles, and explaining a surprisingly generic co-existence of ordered and disordered wrinkle domains. The results agree with numerous test cases across simulation and experiment and represent an elementary geometric toolkit for designing complex wrinkle patterns.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2022

Bounds on heat transfer by incompressible flows between balanced sources and sinks

Internally heated convection involves the transfer of heat by fluid motion between a distribution of sources and sinks. Focusing on the balanced case where the total heat added by the sources matches the heat taken away by the sinks, we obtain \emph{a priori} bounds on the minimum mean thermal dissipation $\langle |\nabla T|^2\rangle$ as a measure of the inefficiency of transport. In the advective limit, our bounds scale with the inverse mean kinetic energy of the flow. The constant in this scaling law depends on the source--sink distribution, as we explain both in a pair of examples involving oscillatory or concentrated heating and cooling, and via a general asymptotic variational principle for optimizing transport. Key to our analysis is the solution of a pure advection equation, which we do to find examples of extreme heat transfer by cellular and `pinching' flows. When the flow obeys a momentum equation, our bound is re-expressed in terms of a flux-based Rayleigh number $Ra$ yielding $\langle |\nabla T|^2\rangle\geq CRa^{-α}$. The power $α$ is $0, 2/3$ or $1$ depending on the arrangement of the sources and sinks relative to gravity.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Continuum field theory for the deformations of planar kirigami

Mechanical metamaterials exhibit exotic properties at the system level, that emerge from the interactions of many nearly rigid building blocks. Determining these emergent properties theoretically has remained an open challenge outside of a few select examples. Here, for a large class of periodic and planar kirigami, we provide a coarse-graining rule linking the design of the panels and slits to the kirigami's macroscale deformations. The procedure gives a system of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE) expressing geometric compatibility of angle functions related to the motion of individual slits. Leveraging known solutions of the PDE, we present excellent agreement between simulations and experiments across kirigami designs. The results reveal a surprising nonlinear wave-type response persisting even at large boundary loads, the existence of which is determined completely by the Poisson's ratio of the unit cell.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2022

Optimal cooling of an internally heated disc

Motivated by the search for sharp bounds on turbulent heat transfer as well as the design of optimal heat exchangers, we consider incompressible flows that most efficiently cool an internally heated disc. Heat enters via a distributed source, is passively advected and diffused, and exits through the boundary at a fixed temperature. We seek an advecting flow to optimize this exchange. Previous work on energy-constrained cooling with a constant source has conjectured that global optimizers should resemble convection rolls; we prove one-sided bounds on energy-constrained cooling corresponding to, but not resolving, this conjecture. In the case of an enstrophy constraint, our results are more complete: we construct a family of self-similar, tree-like ``branching flows'' whose cooling we prove is within a logarithm of globally optimal. These results hold for general space- and time-dependent source-sink distributions that add more heat than they remove. Our main technical tool is a non-local Dirichlet-like variational principle for bounding solutions of the inhomogeneous advection-diffusion equation with a divergence-free velocity.

math.AP↗

arXiv2020

Curvature-driven wrinkling of thin elastic shells

How much energy does it take to stamp a thin elastic shell flat? Motivated by recent experiments on the wrinkling patterns of floating shells, we develop a rigorous method via $Γ$-convergence for answering this question to leading order in the shell's thickness and other small parameters. The observed patterns involve "ordered" regions of well-defined wrinkles alongside "disordered" regions whose local features are less robust; as little to no tension is applied, the preference for order is not a priori clear. Rescaling by the energy of a typical pattern, we derive a limiting variational problem for the effective displacement of the shell. It asks, in a linearized way, to cover up a maximum area with a length-shortening map to the plane. Convex analysis yields a boundary value problem characterizing the accompanying patterns via their defect measures. Partial uniqueness and regularity theorems follow from the method of characteristics on the ordered part of the shell. In this way, we can deduce from the principle of minimum energy the leading order features of stamped elastic shells.

math.AP↗

arXiv2019

Wall-to-wall optimal transport in two dimensions

Gradient ascent methods are developed to compute incompressible flows that maximize heat transport between two isothermal no-slip parallel walls. Parameterizing the magnitude of velocity fields by a Péclet number $\text{Pe}$ proportional to their root-mean-square rate-of-strain, the schemes are applied to compute two-dimensional flows optimizing convective enhancement of diffusive heat transfer, i.e., the Nusselt number $\text{Nu}$ up to $\text{Pe} \approx 10^5$. The resulting transport exhibits a change of scaling from $\text{Nu}-1 \sim \text{Pe}^{2}$ for $\text{Pe} < 10$ in the linear regime to $\text{Nu} \sim \text{Pe}^{0.54}$ for $\text{Pe} > 10^3$. Optimal fields are observed to be approximately separable, i.e., products of functions of the wall-parallel and wall-normal coordinates. Analysis employing a separable ansatz yields a conditional upper bound $\lesssim \text{Pe}^{6/11} = \text{Pe}^{0.\overline{54}}$ as $\text{Pe} \rightarrow \infty$ similar to the computationally achieved scaling. Implications for heat transfer in buoyancy-driven Rayleigh-Bénard convection are discussed.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2019

On the optimal design of wall-to-wall heat transport

We consider the problem of optimizing heat transport through an incompressible fluid layer. Modeling passive scalar transport by advection-diffusion, we maximize the mean rate of total transport by a divergence-free velocity field. Subject to various boundary conditions and intensity constraints, we prove that the maximal rate of transport scales linearly in the r.m.s. kinetic energy and, up to possible logarithmic corrections, as the $1/3$rd power of the mean enstrophy in the advective regime. This makes rigorous a previous prediction on the near optimality of convection rolls for energy-constrained transport. Optimal designs for enstrophy-constrained transport are significantly more difficult to describe: we introduce a "branching" flow design with an unbounded number of degrees of freedom and prove it achieves nearly optimal transport. The main technical tool behind these results is a variational principle for evaluating the transport of candidate designs. The principle admits dual formulations for bounding transport from above and below. While the upper bound is closely related to the "background method", the lower bound reveals a connection between the optimal design problems considered herein and other apparently related model problems from mathematical materials science. These connections serve to motivate designs.

math.AP↗

arXiv2017

Optimal bounds and extremal trajectories for time averages in nonlinear dynamical systems

For any quantity of interest in a system governed by ordinary differential equations, it is natural to seek the largest (or smallest) long-time average among solution trajectories, as well as the extremal trajectories themselves. Upper bounds on time averages can be proved a priori using auxiliary functions, the optimal choice of which is a convex optimization problem. We prove that the problems of finding maximal trajectories and minimal auxiliary functions are strongly dual. Thus, auxiliary functions provide arbitrarily sharp upper bounds on time averages. Moreover, any nearly minimal auxiliary function provides phase space volumes in which all nearly maximal trajectories are guaranteed to lie. For polynomial equations, auxiliary functions can be constructed by semidefinite programming, which we illustrate using the Lorenz system.

math.DS↗

arXiv2017

Optimal wall-to-wall transport by incompressible flows

We consider wall-to-wall transport of a passive tracer by divergence-free velocity vector fields $\mathbf{u}$. Given an enstrophy budget $\langle |\nabla \mathbf{u}|^{2} \rangle \le Pe^{2}$ we construct steady two-dimensional flows that transport at rates $Nu(\mathbf{u}) \gtrsim Pe^{2/3}/(\log Pe)^{4/3}$ in the large enstrophy limit. Combined with the known upper bound $Nu(\mathbf{u})\lesssim Pe^{2/3}$ for any such enstrophy-constrained flow, we conclude that maximally transporting flows satisfy $Nu\sim Pe^{2/3}$ up to possible logarithmic corrections. Combined with known transport bounds in the context of Rayleigh-Bénard convection this establishes that while suitable flows approaching the "ultimate" heat transport scaling $Nu\sim Ra^{1/2}$ exist, they are not always realizable as buoyancy-driven flows. The result is obtained by exploiting a connection between the wall-to-wall optimal transport problem and a closely related class of singularly perturbed variational problems arising in the study of energy-driven pattern formation in materials science.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2016

Bounding the Complexity of Replica Symmetry Breaking for Spherical Spin Glasses

In this paper, we study the Crisanti-Sommers variational problem, which is a variational formula for the free energy of spherical mixed $p$-spin glasses. We begin by computing the dual of this problem using a min-max argument. We find that the dual is a 1-D problem of obstacle type, where the obstacle is related to the covariance structure of the underlying process. This approach yields an alternative way to understand Replica Symmetry Breaking at the level of the variational problem through topological properties of the coincidence set of the optimal dual variable. Using this duality, we give an algorithm to reduce this a priori infinite dimensional variational problem to a finite dimensional one, thereby confining all possible forms of Replica Symmetry Breaking in these models to a finite parameter family. These results complement the authors' related results for the low temperature $Γ$-limit of this variational problem. We briefly discuss the analysis of the Replica Symmetric phase using this approach.

math.PR↗

arXiv2016

Axial compression of a thin elastic cylinder: bounds on the minimum energy scaling law

We consider the axial compression of a thin elastic cylinder placed about a hard cylindrical core. Treating the core as an obstacle, we prove upper and lower bounds on the minimum energy of the cylinder that depend on its relative thickness and the magnitude of axial compression. We focus exclusively on the setting where the radius of the core is greater than or equal to the natural radius of the cylinder. We consider two cases: the "large mandrel" case, where the radius of the core exceeds that of the cylinder, and the "neutral mandrel" case, where the radii of the core and cylinder are the same. In the large mandrel case, our upper and lower bounds match in their scaling with respect to thickness, compression, and the magnitude of pre-strain induced by the core. We construct three types of axisymmetric wrinkling patterns whose energy scales as the minimum in different parameter regimes, corresponding to the presence of many wrinkles, few wrinkles, or no wrinkles at all. In the neutral mandrel case, our upper and lower bounds match in a certain regime in which the compression is small as compared to the thickness; in this regime, the minimum energy scales as that of the unbuckled configuration. We achieve these results for both the von Kármán-Donnell model and a geometrically nonlinear model of elasticity.

math.AP↗

arXiv2016

Low Temperature Asymptotics in Spherical Mean Field Spin Glasses

In this paper, we study the low temperature limit of the spherical Crisanti-Sommers variational problem. We identify the $Γ$-limit of the Crisanti-Sommers functionals, thereby establishing a rigorous variational problem for the ground state energy of spherical mixed $p$-spin glasses. As an application, we compute moderate deviations of the corresponding minimizers in the low temperature limit. In particular, for a large class of models this yields moderate deviations for the overlap distribution. We then analyze the ground state energy problem. We show that this variational problem is dual to an obstacle-type problem. This duality is at the heart of our analysis. We present the regularity theory of the optimizers of the primal and dual problems. This culminates in a simple method for constructing a finite dimensional space in which these optimizers live for any model. As a consequence of these results, we unify independent predictions of Crisanti-Leuzzi and Auffinger-Ben Arous regarding the 1RSB phase in this limit. We find that the "positive replicon eigenvalue" and "pure-like" conditions are together necessary for optimality, but that neither are themselves sufficient, answering a question of Auffinger and Ben Arous in the negative. We end by proving that these conditions completely characterize the 1RSB phase in $2+p$-spin models.

math.PR↗

arXiv2015

Some Properties of the Phase Diagram for Mixed $p$-Spin Glasses

In this paper we study the Parisi variational problem for mixed $p$-spin glasses with Ising spins. Our starting point is a characterization of Parisi measures whose origin lies in the first order optimality conditions for the Parisi functional, which is known to be strictly convex. Using this characterization, we study the phase diagram in the temperature-external field plane. We begin by deriving self-consistency conditions for Parisi measures that generalize those of de Almeida and Thouless to all levels of Replica Symmetry Breaking (RSB) and all models. As a consequence, we conjecture that for all models the Replica Symmetric (RS) phase is the region determined by the natural analogue of the de Almeida-Thouless condition. We show that for all models, the complement of this region is in the RSB phase. Furthermore, we show that the conjectured phase boundary is exactly the phase boundary in the plane less a bounded set. In the case of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, we extend this last result to show that this bounded set does not contain the critical point at zero external field.

math.PR↗

arXiv2015

Symmetry breaking in indented elastic cones

Motivated by simulations of carbon nanocones (see Jordan and Crespi, Phys. Rev. Lett., 2004), we consider a variational plate model for an elastic cone under compression in the direction of the cone symmetry axis. Assuming radial symmetry, and modeling the compression by suitable Dirichlet boundary conditions at the center and the boundary of the sheet, we identify the energy scaling law in the von-Kármán plate model. Specifically, we find that three different regimes arise with increasing indentation $δ$: initially the energetic cost of the logarithmic singularity dominates, then there is a linear response corresponding to a moderate deformation close to the boundary of the cone, and for larger $δ$ a localized inversion takes place in the central region. Then we show that for large enough indentations minimizers of the elastic energy cannot be radially symmetric. We do so by an explicit construction that achieves lower elastic energy than the minimum amount possible for radially symmetric deformations.

math.AP↗