A Duality Principle and Related Convex Dual Formulation Applied to a Non-Linear Model of Plates

This article develops a duality principle applicable to originally non-convex primal variational formulations. More specifically, as a first application, we establish a convex dual variational formulation for a non-linear Kirchhoff-Love plate model. The results are obtained through basic tools of functional analysis, calculus of variations, duality and optimization theory in infinite dimensional spaces. We emphasize such a convex dual formulation obtained may be applied to a large class of similar models in the calculus of variations.