Nonlinear elasticity

In this manuscript with Lev Truskinovsky, we developed a new nonlinear theory of large-strain incompatible surface growth. Surface growth is a crucial component of many natural and artificial processes from cell proliferation to additive manufacturing. In elastic systems, surface growth is usually accompanied by the development of geometrical incompatibility leading to residual stresses and triggering various instabilities. Here we developed a nonlinear theory of incompatible surface growth which quantitatively linkes deposition protocols with post-growth states of stress.

In this paper we analyze the stress field of a solid torus made of an incompressible isotropic solid with a toroidal inclusion that is concentric with the solid torus and has a uniform distribution of pure dilatational finite eigenstrains. We use a perturbation analysis and calculate the residual stresses to the first order in the thinness ratio (the ratio of the radius of the generating circle and the overall radius of the solid torus). In particular, we show that the stress field inside the inclusion is not uniform.

The elastic Ericksen's problem consists of finding deformations in isotropic hyperelastic solids that can be maintained for arbitrary strain-energy density functions.  In the compressible case, Ericksen showed that only homogeneous deformations are possible. Here, we solve the anelastic version of the same problem, that is we determine both the deformations and the eigenstrains such that a solution to the anelastic problem exists for arbitrary strain-energy density functions. Anelasticity is described by finite eigenstrains.

In this paper we are concerned with finding exact solutions for the stress fields of nonlinear solids with non-symmetric distributions of defects (or more generally finite eigenstrains) that are small perturbations of symmetric distributions of defects with known exact solutions. In the language of geometric mechanics this corresponds to finding a deformation that is a result of a perturbation of the metric of the Riemannian material manifold. We present a general framework that can be used for a systematic analysis of this class of anelasticity problems.

We introduce some Hilbert complexes involving second-order tensors on flat compact manifolds with boundary that describe the kinematics and the kinetics of motion in nonlinear elasticity. We then use the general framework of Hilbert complexes to write Hodge-type and Helmholtz-type orthogonal decompositions for second-order tensors.

In this paper we formulate a nonlinear elasticity theory in which the ambient space is evolving. For a continuum moving in an evolving ambient space, we model time dependency of the metric by a time-dependent embedding of the ambient space in a larger manifold with a fixed background metric. We derive both the tangential and the normal governing equations. We then reduce the standard energy balance written in the larger ambient space to that in the evolving ambient space.