Convergence of Thin Vibrating Rods to a Linear Beam Equation

Abstract: We show that solutions for a specifically scaled nonlinear wave equation of nonlinear elasticity converge to solutions of a linear Euler-Bernoulli beam system. We construct an approximation of the solution, using a suitable asymptotic expansion ansatz based upon solutions to the one-dimensional beam equation. Following this, we derive the existence of appropriately scaled initial data and can bound the difference between the analytical solution and the approximating sequence.