New Explicit Expression of Barnett-Lothe Tensors for Anisotropic Linear Elastic Materials

The three Barnett-Lothe tensors H, L, S appear often in the Stroth formalism of two-dimensional deformations of anisotropic elastic materials 1–3]. They also appear in certain three-dimensional problems 4, 5]. The algebraic representation of H, L, S requires computation of the eigenvalues p^v(v=1,2,3) and the normalized eigenvectors (a, b). The integral representation of H, L, S circumvents the need for computing p ^v(v=1,2,3) and (a, b), but it is not simple to integrate the integrals except for special materials. Ting and Lee 6] have recently obtained an explicit expression of H for general anisotropic materials. We present here the remaining tensors L, S using the algebraic representation. They key to our success is the obtaining of the normalization factor for (a, b) in a simple form. The derivation of L and S then makes use of (a, b) but the final result does not require computation of (a, b), which makes the result attractive to numerical computation. Even though the tensor H given in 6] is in terms of the elastic stiffnesses C^μ v while the tensors L, S presented here are in terms of the reduced elastic compliances s′ _μv , the structure of L, S is similar to that of H. Following the derivation of H, we also present alternate expressions of L, S that remain valid for the degenerate cases p ₁ p ₂ and p₁=p₂ = p ₃. One may want to compute H, L, S using either C _μv or s′ _μv v, but not both. We show how an expression in C^μ v can be converted to an expression in s′ _μv v, and vice versa. As an application of the conversion, we present explicit expressions of the extic equation for p in C^μ v and s′ _μv v. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.