Some New Implications of Certain Constitutive Inequalities in Plane Isotropic Elasticity

In plane isotropic elasticity a strengthened form of the Ordered–Forces inequality is shown to imply that the restriction of the strain-energy function to the class of deformation gradients which share the same average of the principal stretches is bounded from below by the strain energy corresponding to the conformal deformations in this class. For boundary conditions of place, this property (together with a certain version of the Pressure–Compression inequality) is then used (i) to show that the plane radial conformal deformations are stable with respect to all radial variations of class C ¹ and (ii) to obtain explicit lower bounds for the total energy associated with arbitrary plane radial deformations. For the same type of boundary conditions and together with a different version of the Pressure–Compression inequality, an analogous property in plane isotropic elasticity (established in 3] under the assumption that the material satisfies a strengthened form of the Baker–Ericksen inequality and according to which the restriction of the strain-energy function to the class of deformation gradients which share the same determinant is bounded from below by the strain energy corresponding to the conformal deformations in that class) is used (i) to show that the plane radial conformal deformations are stable with respect to all variations of class C ¹ and (ii) to obtain explicit lower bounds for the total energy associated with any plane deformation.