Edge Contact Forces and Quasi-Balanced Power

We consider continuous media in which contact edge forces are present. Introducing thenotion of quasi-balanced contact force distribution, we are able to prove the conjectures by Noll andVirga [1] concerning the representation of contact edge forces. We generalize the Hamel--Nolltheorem on the Cauchy postulate. Then we adapt the celebrated tetrahedron construction of Cauchy in orderto obtain a representation theorem for stress states. In fact, we show that two stress tensors of order twoand three are necessary for such a representation. Moreover we find the relationship between the notionof interstitial working introduced by Dunn and Serrin [2] and the notion of contact edge force.