Surface Growth in Deformable Solids using an Eulerian Formulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an Eulerian continuum mechanics framework for modeling surface growth in deformable solids, overcoming limitations of traditional methods by using relaxed and elastic deformations as key variables.

Contribution

It develops a novel Eulerian formulation for surface growth that incorporates relaxed and elastic deformations, allowing for non-normal growth and boundary condition simplicity.

Findings

The model captures surface growth with only density, velocity, and elastic deformation variables.

It enables modeling of non-normal growth using standard growth velocities.

The approach simplifies boundary condition prescription for surface growth.

Abstract

Growth occurs in a wide range of systems ranging from biological tissue to additive manufacturing. This work considers surface growth, in which mass is added to the boundary of a continuum body from the ambient medium or from within the body. In contrast to bulk growth in the interior, the description of surface growth requires the addition of new continuum particles to the body. This is challenging for standard continuum formulations for solids that are meant for situations with a fixed amount of material. Recent approaches to handle this have used time-evolving reference configurations. In this work, an Eulerian approach to this problem is formulated, enabling the side-stepping of the issue of constructing the reference configuration. However, this raises the complementary challenge of determining the stress response of the solid, which typically requires the deformation gradient that is not immediately available in the Eulerian formulation. To resolve this, the approach introduces additional kinematic descriptors, namely the relaxed zero-stress deformation and the elastic deformation; in contrast to the deformation gradient, these have the important advantage that they are not required to satisfy kinematic compatibility. The resulting model has only the density, velocity, and elastic deformation as variables in the Eulerian setting. The introduction in this formulation of the relaxed deformation and the elastic deformation provides a description of surface growth whereby the added material can bring in its own kinematic information. Loosely, the added material "brings in its own reference configuration" through the specification of the relaxed deformation and the elastic deformation of the added material. This kinematic description enables, e.g., modeling of non-normal growth using a standard normal growth velocity and a simple approach to prescribing boundary conditions.