In the celebrated work of Friesecke, James and Müller ’06, the authors derive a hierarchy of models for plates by carefully analyzing the \(\Gamma \) -convergence of the rescaled nonlinear elastic energy. The key ingredient of their proofs is the rigidity estimate proved in an earlier work of theirs. Here, we consider the case in which the elastic energy has a multi-well structure: This type of functional arises, for example, in the study of solid–solid phase transitions. Since the rigidity estimate fails in the case of compatible wells, we follow Alicandro, Dal Maso, Lazzaroni and Palombaro ’18 and add a regularization term to the energy that penalizes jumps from one well to another, leading to good compactness properties. In this setting, we recover the full hierarchy of plate models with an explicit dependence on the wells. Finally, we study the convergence of energy minimizers with suitable external forces and full Neumann boundary conditions. To do so, we adapt the definition of optimal rotations introduced by Maor, Mora ’21.
