3.4 Generalized Hooke’s law elastic materials subjected to small stretches
but large rotations
Recall that the stress-strain law for
an anisotropic, linear elastic material (Sect 3.2) has the form
where is stress (any stress measure you like), is the infinitesimal strain, and is the tensor of elastic moduli.
This
stress-strain relation can only be used if the material is subjected to small deformations,
and small rotations. This is partly
because the infinitesimal strain for a finite rotation so the law predicts that a nonzero stress is
required to rotate a solid, but also because the constitutive law does not
predict that the (in an anisotropic material) the elastic moduli may change as
the material rotates.
There are some situations where a
solid is subjected to small shape changes, but large rotations. For example, the figure shows a long slender
beam bent into a circle by moments applied to its ends. The strains in the beam are of order , where h is the thickness of the beam and R is its curvature. The ends
of the beam have rotated through a full 90 degrees, however. The linear elastic constitutive equations
would not predict the correct stress in the beam.
It is easy to fix this problem: provided we
choose a sensible (nonlinear) strain measure, together with the appropriate
work-conjugate stress measure, we can still use a linear stress-strain
relation. To make this precise, suppose
that a solid is subjected to a displacement field , as shown below.

Define
· The deformation gradient and its Jacobian
· The Lagrange strain
· The Eulerian strain
· The rotation tensor (see 2.1.13 for
the best way to compute R in practice)
· The Cauchy (“true”) stress , defined so that
· The Material stress (work conjugate
to Lagrange strain)
The Material
stress-Lagrange strain relation can be expressed as
where is the tensor of elastic moduli for the material
with orientation in the undeformed configuration. This is identical to the stress-strain
relation for a linear elastic solid, except that the stress measure has been
replaced by Material stress, and the strain measure has been replaced by
Lagrange strain. You can therefore use all the matrix representations and
tables of data given in Section 3.1 to apply the constitutive equation. The
Cauchy (“true”) stress can be computed from the material stress as
The Cauchy
stress-Eulerian strain relation: Alternatively, the stress-strain relation can be expressed in
terms of stress and deformation measures that characterize the deformed solid,
as
where is the tensor of elastic moduli for the
material with orientation of the deformed configuration. This tensor is related to by
For the special case of an isotropic
material with Young’s modulus E
and Poisson’s ratio