On the Convergence of a Regularization Scheme for Approximating Cavitation Solutions with Prescribed Cavity Volume

Let $\Omega\in\mathbb{R}^n$, $n=2,3$, be the region occupied by a hyperelastic body in its reference configuration. Let $E(\cdot)$ be the stored energy functional, and let $x_0$ be a flaw point in $\Omega$ (i.e., a point of possible discontinuity for admissible deformations of the body). For $V>0$ fixed, let $u_V$ be a minimizer of $E(\cdot)$ among the set of discontinuous deformations $u$ constrained to form a hole of prescribed volume $V$ at $x_0$ and satisfying the homogeneous boundary data $u(x)=Ax$ for $x\in\partial \Omega$. In this paper we describe a regularization scheme for the computation of both $u_V$ and $E(u_V)$ and study its convergence properties. In particular, we show that as the regularization parameter goes to zero, (a subsequence) of the regularized constrained minimizers converge weakly in $W^{1,p}(\Omega\setminus{{\mathcal{B}}_{\delta}(x_0)})$ to a minimizer $u_{V}$ for any $\delta>0$. We obtain various sensitivity results for the dependence of the energies and Lagrange multipliers of the regularized constrained minimizers on the boundary data $A$ and on the volume parameter $V$. We show that both the regularized constrained minimizers and $u_V$ satisfy suitable weak versions of the corresponding Euler--Lagrange equations. In addition we describe the main features of a numerical scheme for approximating $u_V$ and $E(u_V)$ and give numerical examples for the case of a stored energy function of an elastic fluid and in the case of the incompressible limit.