Justification of the Reissner-Mindlin plate theory through variational convergence

We provide a justification of the Reissner–Mindlin plate theory, using linear three- dimensional elasticity as framework and Γ-convergence as technical tool. Essential to our developments is the selection of a transversely isotropic material class whose stored energy depends on (first and) second gradients of the displacement field. Our choices of a candidate Γ-limit and a scaling law of the basic energy functional in terms of a thinness parameter are guided by mechanical and formal arguments that our variational convergence theorem is meant to validate mathematically.