Biological membranes are often idealized as incompressible elastic surfaces whose
strain energy only depends on their mean curvature and possibly on their shear. We
show that this type of model can be derived using a formal asymptotic method by
considering biological membranes to be thin, strongly anisotropic, elastic, locally
homogeneous bodies.
Keywords
shell, nonlinear elasticity, Helfrich, red blood cell,
vesicle