A Natural Generalization of Hypoelasticity and Eulerian Rate Type Formulation of Hyperelasticity

According to the classical hypoelasticity theory, the hypoelasticity tensor, i.e. the fourth order Eulerian constitutive tensor, characterizing the linear relationship between the stretching and an objective stress rate, is dependent on the current stress and must be isotropic. Although the classical hypoelasticity in this sense includes as a particular case the isotropic elasticity, it fails to incorporate any given type of anisotropic elasticity. This implies that one can formulate the isotropic elasticity as an integrable-exactly classical hypoelastic relation, whereas one can in no way do the same for any given type of anisotropic elasticity. A generalization of classical theory is available, which assumes that the material time derivative of the rotated stress is dependent on the rotated Cauchy stress, the rotated stretching and a Lagrangean spin, linear and of the first degree in the latter two. As compared with the original idea of classical hypoelasticity, perhaps the just-mentioned generalization might be somewhat drastic. In this article, we show that, merely replacing the isotropy property of the aforementioned stress-dependent hypoelasticity tensor with the invariance property of the latter under an R-rotating material symmetry group R⋆ G ₀, one may establish a natural generalization of classical theory, which includes all of elasticity. Here R is the rotation tensor in the polar decomposition of the deformation gradient and G ₀ any given initial material symmetry group. In particular, the classical case is recovered whenever the material symmetry is assumed to be isotropic. With the new generalization it is demonstrated that any two non-integrable hypoelastic relations based on any two objective stress rates predict quite different path-dependent responses in nature and hence can in no sense be equivalent. Thus, the non-integrable hypoelastic relations based on any given objective stress rate constitute an independent constitutive class in its own right which is disjoint with and hence distinguishes itself from any class based on another objective stress rate. Only for elasticity, equivalent hypoelastic formulations based on different stress rates may be established. Moreover, universal integrability conditions are derived for all kinds of objective corotational stress rates and for all types of material symmetry. Explicit, simple, integrable-exactly hypoelastic relations based on the newly discovered logarithmic stress rate are presented to characterize hyperelasticity with any given type of material symmetry. It is shown that, to achieve the latter goal, the logarithmic stress rate is the only choice among all infinitely many objective corotational stress rates. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.