Design of pre-stressed plate-strips to cover non-developable shells

In this paper we address the following design problem: what is the shape of a plate and the associated pre-stress that relaxes toward a given three-dimensional shell ? As isometric transformations conserve the gaussian curvature, three-dimensional non-developable shells cannot be obtained from the relaxation of pre-strained plates by using isometric transformations only. Overcoming this geometric restriction, including small-strains and large rotations, solves the problem for small areas only. This paper dispenses with the small-area restriction to cover three-dimensional shells fully by using shell-strips. Since shell-strips have an additional geometric parameter, we show that under suitable assumptions that relate the width of the strip to the curvature of the shell, we are able to design arbitrary shell surfaces by covering them with shell-strips. As an illustration, we provide optimized covers of the sphere in a variety of different surface-strips relaxed from plate-strips with homogeneous and isotropic pre-stress. Moreover, we propose the design of the torus, of the helicoid and of the non-developable Möbius band, which requires inhomogeneous and anisotropic pre-stress. © 2022 Elsevier Masson SAS