Problems involving materials with thin layers arise in various application fields. We present here the use of asymptotic expansions for linear elliptic problems to derive and justify so-called ap-proximate or effective boundary conditions. We first recall the known results of the literature, and then discuss the optimality of the error estimates in the smooth case. For non-smooth geometries, the results of [18, 57] are commented and adapted to a model problem, and two improvements of the approximate model are proposed to increase its numerical performance.