universal displacement

For a given class of materials, universal displacements are those displacements that can be maintained for any member of the class by applying only boundary tractions. In this paper we study universal displacements in compressible anisotropic linear elastic solids reinforced by a family of inextensible fibers. For each symmetry class and for a uniform distribution of straight fibers respecting the corresponding symmetry we characterize the respective universal displacements. A goal of this paper is to investigate how an internal constraint affects the set of universal displacements.

In linear elasticity, universal displacements for a given symmetry class are those displacements that can be maintained by only applying boundary tractions (no body forces) and for arbitrary elastic constants in the symmetry class. In a previous work, we showed that  the larger the symmetry group, the larger the space of universal displacements. Here, we generalize these ideas to the case of anelasticity. In linear anelasticity, the total strain is additively decomposed into elastic strain and anelastic strain, often referred to as an eigenstrain.

Universal displacements are those displacements that can be maintained, in the absence of body forces, by applying only boundary tractions  for any material in a given class of materials. Therefore, equilibrium equations must be satisfied for arbitrary elastic moduli for a given anisotropy class. These conditions can be expressed as a set of partial differential equations for the displacement field that we call universality constraints.

In nonlinear elasticity, universal deformations are the deformations that exist for arbitrary strain-energy density functions and suitable tractions at the boundaries. Here, we discuss the equivalent problem for linear elasticity. We characterize the universal displacements of  linear elasticity: those displacement fields that can be maintained by applying boundary tractions in the absence of body forces for any linear elastic solid in a given anisotropy class.