On the Material Symmetry of Elastic Rods

This paper presents a treatment of material symmetry for hyperelastic rods. The rod theory of interest is based on a Cosserat (or directed) curve with two director fields, and was developed in a series of works by Green, Naghdi and several of their co-workers. The treatment is based on Murdoch and Cohen's work on material symmetry of Cosserat surfaces. Two material symmetry groups are discussed: one pertains to the strain-energy function, while the other pertains to the response functions. The paper closes by showing how the treatment relates to the form-invariant approach used in Green and Naghdi's papers and a treatment proposed recently by Cohen. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.