We consider a singularly-perturbed two-well problem in the context of planar geometrically linear elasticity to model a rectangular martensitic nucleus in an austenitic matrix. We derive the scaling regimes for the minimal energy in terms of the problem parameters, which represent the shape of the nucleus, the quotient of the elastic moduli of the two phases, the surface energy constant, and the volume fraction of the two martensitic variants. We identify several different scaling regimes, which are distinguished either by the exponents in the parameters, or by logarithmic corrections, for which we have matching upper and lower bounds.

We consider a singularly-perturbed nonconvex energy functional which arises in the study of microstructures in shape memory alloys. The scaling law for the minimal energy predicts a transition from a parameter regime in which uniform structures are favored, to a regime in which the formation of fine patterns is expected. We focus on the transition regime and derive the reduced model in the sense of Γ-convergence. The limit functional turns out to be similar to the Mumford-Shah functional with additional constraints on the jump set of admissible functions. One key ingredient in the proof is an approximation result for SBV p functions whose jump sets have a prescribed orientation.

We prove that microstructures in shape-memory alloys have a self-similar refinement pattern close to austenite-martensite interfaces, working within the scalar Kohn-Müller model. The latter is based on nonlinear elasticity and includes a singular perturbation representing the energy of the interfaces between martensitic variants. Our results include the case of low-hysteresis materials in which one variant has a small volume fraction. Precisely, we prove asymptotic self-similarity in the sense of strong convergence of blow-ups around points at the austenite-martensite interface. Key ingredients in the proof are pointwise estimates and local energy bounds. This generalizes previous results by one of us to various boundary conditions, arbitrary rectangular domains, and arbitrary volume fractions of the martensitic variants, including the regime in which the energy scales as $\varepsilon ^{2/3}$ ε 2 / 3 as well as the one where the energy scales as $\varepsilon ^{1/2}$ ε 1 / 2 .

We consider a variational model for the energy of deformations of shape-memory materials. We restrict ourselves to a scalarvalued, two dimensional simplification with two variants of martensite in which one of the variants has a much smaller volume fraction than the other one. We study the transition between a single phase and fine microstructures and compute the Γ-limit for one volume fraction tending to zero.

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