On Cavitation, Configurational Forces and Implications for Fracture in a Nonlinearly Elastic Material

Experiments on polymers indicate that large tensile stress can induce cavitation, that is, the appearance of voids that were not previously evident in the material. This phenomenon can be viewed as either the growth of pre-existing infinitesimal holes in the material or, alternatively, as the spontaneous creation of new holes in an initially perfect body. In this paper our approach is to adopt both views concurrently within the framework of the variational theory of nonlinear elasticity. We model an elastomer on a macroscale as a void-free material and, on a microscale, as a material containing certain defects that are the only points at which hole formation can occur. Mathematically, this is accomplished by the use of deformations whose point singularities are constrained. One consequence of this viewpoint is that cavitation may then take place at a point that is not energetically optimal. We show that this disparity will generate configurational forces, a type of force identified previously in dislocations in crystals, in phase transitions in solids, in solidification, and in fracture mechanics. As an application of this approach we study the energetically optimal point for a solitary hole to form in a homogeneous and isotropic elastic ball subject to radial boundary displacements. We show, in particular, that the center of the ball is the unique optimal point. Finally, we speculate that the configurational force generated by cavitation at a non-optimal material point may be sufficient to result in the onset of fracture. The analysis utilizes the energy-momentum tensor, the asymptotics of an equilibrium solution with an isolated singularity, and the linear theory of elasticity at the stressed configuration that the body occupies immediately prior to cavitation. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Fractional Model of Continuum Mechanics

Although there has been renewed interest in the use of fractional models in many application areas, in reality fractional analysis has a long and distinguished history and can be traced back to the likes of Leibniz (Letter to L’Hospital, 1695), Liouville (J. éc. Polytech. 13:71, 1832), and Riemann (Gesammelte Werke, p. 62, 1876). Recent publications (Podlubny in Math. Sci. Eng. 198, 1999; Sabatier et al. in Advances in fractional calculus: theoretical developments and applications in physics and engineering, Springer, Berlin, 2007; Das in Functional fractional calculus for system identification and controls, Springer, Berlin, 2007) demonstrate that fractional derivative models have found widespread applications in science and engineering. Late fundamental considerations have led to the introduction of fractional calculus in continuum mechanics in an attempt to develop non-local constitutive relations (Lazopoulos in Mech. Res. Commun. 33:753–757, 2006). Attempts have also been made to model microscopic forces using fractional derivatives (Vazquez in Nonlinear waves: classical and quantum aspects, pp. 129–133, 2004). Our approach in this paper differs from previous theoretical work, in that we develop a general framework directly from the classical continuum mechanics, by defining the laws of motion and the stresses using fractional derivatives. The timeliness and relevance of this work is justified by the surge in interest in applications of fractional order models to biological, physical and economic systems. The aim of the present paper is to lay the foundations for a new non-local model of continuum mechanics based on fractional order derivatives which we will refer to as the fractional model of continuum mechanics. Following the theoretical development, we apply this framework to two one-dimensional model problems: the deformation of an infinite bar subjected to a self-equilibrated load distribution, and the propagation of longitudinal waves in a thin finite bar.     

Energy Minimising Properties of the Radial Cavitation Solution in Incompressible Nonlinear Elasticity

Consider an incompressible, hyperelastic material occupying the unit ball B⊂ℝ ⁿ in its reference state. Suppose that the deformation u:B→ℝ ⁿ is specified on the boundary by

On the Symmetry of Energy-Minimising Deformations in Nonlinear Elasticity II: Compressible Materials

Consider a homogeneous, isotropic, hyperelastic body occupying the region ${A = \{{\bf x}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}\, : \,a <\,|{\bf x} |\,< b \}}$ in its reference state and subject to radially symmetric displacement, or mixed displacement/traction, boundary conditions. In Part I (Sivaloganathan and Spector in Arch Ration Mech Anal, 2009, in press) the authors restricted their attention to incompressible materials. For a large-class of polyconvex constitutive relations that grow sufficiently rapidly at infinity it was shown that to each nonradial isochoric deformation of A there corresponds a radial isochoric deformation that has strictly less elastic energy than the given deformation. In this paper that analysis is further developed and extended to the compressible case. The key ingredient is a new radial-symmetrisation procedure that is appropriate for problems where the symmetrised mapping must be one-to-one in order to prevent interpenetration of matter. For the pure displacement boundary-value problem, the radial symmetrisation of an orientation-preserving diffeomorphism u : A → A* between spherical shells A and A* is the deformation $${\bf u}^{\rm rad}({\bf x})=\frac{r(R)}{R}{\bf x}, \quad R=|{\bf x}|,\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad(0.1)$$ that maps each sphere ${S_R\subset\,A}$ , of radius R > 0, centred at the origin into another such sphere ${S_r={\bf u}^{\rm rad}(S_R)\subset\,A^*}$ that encloses the same volume as u(S _R ). Since the volumes enclosed by the surfaces u(S _R ) and u ^rad (S _R ) are equal, the classical isoperimetric inequality implies that ${{{\rm Area}( {\bf u}^{\rm rad} (S_R))\leqq {\rm Area}({\bf u} (S_R))}}$ . The equality of the enclosed volumes together with this reduction in surface area is then shown to give rise to a reduction in total energy for many of the constitutive relations used in nonlinear elasticity. These results are also extended to classes of Sobolev deformations and applied to prove that the radially symmetric solutions to these boundary-value problems are local or global energy minimisers in various classes of (possibly nonsymmetric) deformations of a thick spherical shell.     

On the Optimal Location of Singularities Arising in Variational Problems of Nonlinear Elasticity

Experiments on elastomers have shown that triaxial tension can induce a material to exhibit holes that were not previously evident. Analytic work in nonlinear elasticity has established that such cavity formation may indeed be an elastic phenomenon: sufficiently large prescribed boundary deformations yield a hole-creating deformation as the energy minimizer whenever the elastic energy is of slow growth. One of the many unanswered problems is where such holes will form. In this paper we suggest a new method, which is based upon asymptotics and linear elasticity, that can be used to determine the optimal location for hole creation. Using this method we show that, under reasonable hypotheses, the center is (locally) the best position for a solitary hole to form in an elastic ball. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Highly efficient parallel algorithm for finite difference solution to Navier–Stoke''s equation on a hypercube

It has been shown in [Nuclear Science and Engineering 93 (1986) 6799] that the finite difference discretization of Navier–Stoke's equation leads to the solution of N×N system written in the matrix form as My=B, where M is a quasi-tridiagonal having non-zero elements at the top right and bottom left corners. We present an efficient parallel algorithm on a p-processor hypercube implemented in two phases. In phase I a generalization of an algorithm due to Kowalik [High Speed Computation, Springer, New York] is developed which decomposes the above matrix system into smaller quasi-tridiagonal (p+1)×(p+1) subsystem, which is then solved in Phase II using an odd–even reduction method.     

On the Stability of Incompressible Elastic Cylinders in Uniaxial Extension

Consider a cylinder (not necessarily of circular cross-section) that is composed of a hyperelastic material and which is stretched parallel to its axis of symmetry. Suppose that the elastic material that constitutes the cylinder is homogeneous, transversely isotropic, and incompressible and that the deformed length of the cylinder is prescribed, the ends of the cylinder are free of shear, and the sides are left completely free. In this paper it is shown that mild additional constitutive hypotheses on the stored-energy function imply that the unique absolute minimizer of the elastic energy for this problem is a homogeneous, isoaxial deformation. This extends recent results that show the same result is valid in 2-dimensions. Prior work on this problem had been restricted to a local analysis: in particular, it was previously known that homogeneous deformations are strict (weak) relative minimizers of the elastic energy as long as the underlying linearized equations are strongly elliptic and provided that the load/displacement curve in this class of deformations does not possess a maximum.