The use of a virtual configuration in formulating constitutive equations for residually stressed elastic materials

Residual stress is the stress present in the unloaded equilibrium configuration of a body. Because residual stresses can significantly affect the mechanical behavior of a component, the measurement of these stresses and the prediction of their effect on mechanical behavior are important objectives in many engineering problems. Common methods for the measurement of residual stresses include various destructive experiments in which the body is cut to relieve the residual stress. The resulting strain is measured and used to approximate the original residual stress in the intact body. In order to predict the mechanical behavior of a residually stressed body, a constitutive model is required that includes the influence of the residual stress.In this paper we present a method by which the data obtained from standard destructive experiments can be used to derive constitutive equations that describe the mechanical behavior of elastic residually stressed bodies. The derivation is based on the idea that for each infinitesimal neighborhood in a residually stressed body, there exists a corresponding stress free configuration. We refer to this stress free configuration as the virtual configuration of the infinitesimal neighborhood. The derivation requires that the constitutive equation for the stress free material be known and invertible; it is used to relate the residual stress to the deformation of the virtual configuration into the residually stressed configuration. Although the concept of the virtual configuration is central to the derivation, the geometry of this configuration need not be determined explicitly, and it need not be achievable experimentally, in order to construct the constitutive equation for the residually stressed body.The general mathematical forms of constitutive equations valid for residually stressed elastic materials have been derived previously for a number of cases. These general forms contain numerous unknown material-response functions or material constants that must be determined experimentally. In contrast, the method presented here results in a constitutive equation that is an explicit function of residual stress and includes only the material parameters required to describe the stress free material.After presenting the method for the derivation of constitutive equations, we explore the relationship between destructive experiments and the theory used in the derivation. Specifically, we discuss the use of the theory to improve the design of destructive experiments, and the use of destructive experiments to obtain the data required to construct the constitutive equation for a particular material.