On the stability of a compressible Rivlin's cube made of transversely isotropic material

^** Email: kostas.soldatos{at}nottingham.ac.uk This paper considers a unit cube made of a compressible, transverselyisotropic elastic material, with the direction of transverseisotropy being aligned normal to one pair of the cube's faces,and investigates the stability of a dilatation equilibrium stateof that cube, with respect to superposed pure homogeneous deformationswith principal directions parallel to the cube edges. This dilatation,intermediate equilibrium state (state I) of the cube is assumedattainable in two different ways. Accordingly, in what is termedas the ‘principal stability problem’ under investigation,state I is considered to be that of uniform dilatation, whichis attained upon loading normally and uniformly the oppositefaces of the unit cube with certain pairs of equal and oppositelydirected forces having appropriately selected magnitudes. Inwhat is termed as the ‘modified stability problem’under investigation, the same compressible, transversely isotropicunit cube is loaded uniformly by three identical pairs of equaland oppositely directed forces acting normally to its faces,and, hence, it attains in state I the shape of a certain rectangularparallelepiped. The necessary and sufficient conditions forstability of state I of the cube deformation are obtained inthe form of three inequalities, which are found to hold regardlessof whether the intermediate equilibrium state I is that of uniformdilatation or that of the aforementioned rectangular parallelepiped(non-uniform dilatation). These, however, lead to quite differentspecific results and conclusions when applied in connectionwith, first, the principal and, then, the modified stabilityproblem of a unit cube made of a particular type of a transverselyisotropic extension of the Blatz–Ko (isotropic) material.