isometric embedding

(in Journal of Elasticity)

A continuum mechanical framework is developed for determining a) the class of stress-free deformed shapes and corresponding director distributions on the undeformed configuration of a nematic glass membrane that has a prescribed spontaneous stretch field and b) the class of undeformed configurations and corresponding director distributions on it resulting in a stress-free given deformed shape of a nematic glass sheet with a prescribed spontaneous stretch field. The proposed solution rests on an understanding of how the Lagrangian dyad of a deformation of a membrane maps into the Euleriandyad in three dimensional ambient space. Interesting connections between these practical questions of design and the mathematical theory of isometric embeddings of manifolds, deformations between two prescribed Riemannian manifolds, and the slip-line theory of plasticity are pointed out.

Amit Acharya, Gui-Qiang Chen, Siran Li, Marshall Slemrod, and Dehua Wang

(To appear in Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis)

We are concerned with underlying connections between fluids,
elasticity, isometric embedding of Riemannian manifolds, and the existence of
wrinkled solutions of the associated nonlinear partial differential equations. In
this paper, we develop such connections for the case of two spatial dimensions,
and demonstrate that the continuum mechanical equations can be mapped into
a corresponding geometric framework and the inherent direct application of
the theory of isometric embeddings and the Gauss-Codazzi equations through
examples for the Euler equations for fluids and the Euler-Lagrange equations
for elastic solids. These results show that the geometric theory provides an
avenue for addressing the admissibility criteria for nonlinear conservation laws
in continuum mechanics.