Geometric elasticity

The problems of singularity formation and hydrostatic stress created by an inhomogeneity with eigenstrain in an incompressible isotropic hyperelastic material are considered. For both a spherical ball and a cylindrical bar with a radially-symmetric distribution of finite possibly anisotropic eigenstrains, we show that the anisotropy of these eigenstrains at the center (the center of the sphere or the axis of the cylinder) controls the stress singularity.

We study some differential complexes in continuum mechanics that involve both symmetric and non-symmetric second-order tensors. In particular, we show that the tensorial analogue of the standard grad-curl-div complex can simultaneously describe the kinematics and the kinetics of motions of a continuum. The relation between this complex and the de Rham complex allows one to readily derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for the compatibility of the displacement gradient and the existence of stress functions on non-contractible bodies.

We introduce a geometric framework to calculate the residual stress fields and deformations of nonlinear solids with inclusions and eigenstrains. Inclusions are regions in a body with different reference configurations from the body itself and can be described by distributed eigenstrains. Geometrically, the eigenstrains define a Riemannian 3-manifold in which the body is stress-free by construction. The problem of residual stress calculation is then reduced to finding a mapping from the Riemannian material manifold to the ambient Euclidean space.

In this paper, we present a geometric discretization scheme for incompressible linearized elasticity. We use ideas from discrete exterior calculus (DEC) to write the action for a discretized elastic body modeled by a simplicial complex. After characterizing the configuration manifold of volume-preserving discrete deformations, we use Hamilton's principle on this configuration manifold. The discrete Euler-Lagrange equations are obtained without using Lagrange multipliers.

In this paper we formulate a geometric theory of thermal stresses.
Given a temperature distribution, we associate a Riemannian
material manifold to the body, with a metric that explicitly
depends on the temperature distribution. A change of temperature
corresponds to a change of the material metric. In this sense, a
temperature change is a concrete example of the so-called
referential evolutions. We also make a concrete connection between
our geometric point of view and the multiplicative decomposition