Pure Axial Shear of Isotropic, Incompressible Nonlinearly Elastic Materials with Limiting Chain Extensibility

The purpose of this research is to investigate the pure axial shear problem for a circular cylindrical tube composed of isotropic hyperelastic incompressible materials with limiting chain extensibility. Two popular models that account for hardening at large deformations are examined. These involve a strain-energy density which depends only on the first invariant of the Cauchy–Green tensor. In the limit as a polymeric chain extensibility tends to infinity, all of these models reduce to the classical neo-Hookean form. The stress fields and axial displacements are characterized for each of these models. Explicit closed-form analytic expressions are obtained. The results are compared with one another and with the predictions of the neo-Hookean model. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.