The Simply Laminated Microstructure in Martensitic Crystals that Undergo a Cubic-to-Orthorhombic Phase Transformation

Abstract

We study simply laminated microstructures of a martensitic crystal capable of undergoing a cubic‐to‐orthorhombic transformation of type P^((432))→P^((222))′ . The free energy density modeling such a crystal is minimized on six energy wells that are pairwise rank‐one connected. We consider the energy minimization problem with Dirichlet boundary data compatible with an arbitrary but fixed simple laminate. We first show that for all but a few isolated values of transformation strains, this problem has a unique Young measure solution solely characterized by the boundary data that represents the simply laminated microstructure. We then present a theory of stability for such a microstructure, and apply it to the conforming finite element approximation to obtain the corresponding error estimates for the finite element energy minimizers.