Remarks on the Instability of an Incompressible and Isotropic Hyperelastic, Thick-Walled Cylindrical Tube

The problem of instability of a hyperelastic, thick-walled cylindrical tube was first studied by Wilkes 1] in 1955. The solution was formulated within the framework of the theory of small deformations superimposed on large homogeneous deformations for the general class of incompressible, isotropic materials; and results for axially symmetrical buckling were obtained for the neo-Hookean material. The solution involves a certain quadratic equation whose characteristic roots depend on the material response functions. For the neo-Hookean material these roots always are positive. In fact, here we show for the more general Mooney–Rivlin material that these roots always are positive, provided the empirical inequalities hold. In a recent study 2] of this problem for a class of internally constrained compressible materials, it is observed that these characteristic roots may be real-valued, pure imaginary, or complex-valued. The similarity of the analytical structure of the two problems, however, is most striking; and this similarity leads one to question possible complex-valued solutions for the incompressible case. Some remarks on this issue will be presented and some new results will be reported, including additional results for both the neo-Hookean and Mooney–Rivlin materials. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.