On the feasible set of a membrane shell under confinement. Smooth inactive admissible displacements are dense

RESUMO

We establish a density property for the obstacle problem of a linearly elastic elliptic membrane shell required to remain confined in a prescribed half-space. For a bounded Lipschitz reference domain, and under the sole assumption that the reference configuration lies at a strictly positive distance from the confining plane, we prove that smooth admissible displacements for which the confinement constraint is inactive (satisfied with a strictly positive margin) are dense in the set of all admissible displacements. This removes the additional condition on the unit normal to the mid-surface required in previous work, and the approximation scheme is elementary and adaptable to other unilateral obstacle problems.