Universal Deformations for a Class of Compressible Isotropic Hyperelastic Materials

Differential conditions are derived for a smooth deformation to be universal for a class of isotropic hyperelastic materials that we regard as a compressible variant (a notion we make precise) of Mooney–Rivlin’s class, and that includes the materials studied originally by Tolotti in 1943 and later, independently, by Blatz. The collection of all universal deformations for an incompressible material class is shown to contain, modulo a uniform dilation, all the universal deformations for its compressible variants. As an application of this result, by searching the known families of universal deformations for all incompressible isotropic materials, a nontrivial universal deformation for Tolotti materials is found. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.