Saint-Venant’s Principle and the Torsion of Thin Shells of Revolution

This paper is concerned with obtaining stress estimates for the problem of axisymmetric torsion of thin elastic shells of revolution subject to self-equilibrated end loads. The results are obtained in the form of explicit pointwise stress bounds exhibiting an exponential decay with distance from the ends, thus supplying a quantitative characterization of Saint-Venant’s principle for this problem. In contrast to arguments using energy inequalities, here we apply a technique, recently developed by the authors, based on the maximum principle for second-order uniformly elliptic equations.