By means of the energy method we determine the behaviour of the canonical free energy of an elastic body, immersed in an environment that is thermally and mechanically passive; we use as constitutive equation for the heat flux a Maxwell-Cattaneo like equation.
We treat the problem of constructing exact theories of rods and shells for thin incompressible bodies. We employ a systematic method that consists in imposing constraints to reduce the number of degrees of freedom of each cross section to a finite number. We show that it is very difficult to produce theories that exactly preserve the incompressibility and we show that it is impossible to do so for naive theories. In particular, many exact theories have nonlocal effects.
We consider a class of second-gradient elasticity models for which the internal potential energy is taken as the sum of a convex function of the second gradient of the deformation and a general function of the gradient. However, in consonance with classical nonlinear elasticity, the latter is assumed to grow unboundedly as the determinant of the gradient approaches zero. While the existence of a minimizer is routine, the existence of weak solutions is not, and we focus our efforts on that question...
We consider a class of second-gradient elasticity models for which the internal potential energy is taken as the sum of a convex function of the second gradient of the deformation and a general function of the gradient. However, in consonance with classical nonlinear elasticity, the latter is assumed to grow unboundedly as the determinant of the gradient approaches zero. While the existence of a minimizer is routine, the existence of weak solutions is not, and we focus our efforts on that question...