Hypo-elasticity, Cauchy-elasticity, corotational stability and monotonicity in the logarithmic strain

TL;DR

This paper establishes a fundamental link between corotational stability, monotonicity in logarithmic strain, and the positive definiteness of tangent stiffness tensors in Cauchy-elastic materials, using novel mathematical tools.

Contribution

It introduces the corotational stability postulate and proves its equivalence to strong monotonicity in the logarithmic strain, providing a new theoretical foundation for hypo-elasticity in finite strain elasticity.

Findings

CSP implies TSTS-M++ and vice versa.

The tangent stiffness tensor is positive definite under these conditions.

The results extend to Green-Naghdi and logarithmic corotational rates.

Abstract

We combine the rate-formulation for the objective, corotational Zaremba-Jaumann rate \begin{align} \frac{{\rm D}^{\rm ZJ}}{{\rm D} t} [\sigma] = \mathbb{H}^{\rm ZJ}(\sigma).D, \qquad D = {\rm sym} {\rm D} v\,, \end{align} operating on the Cauchy stress $\sigma$, the Eulerian strain rate $D$ and the spatial velocity $v$ with the novel \enquote{corotational stability postulate} (CSP)\begin{equation} \Bigl\langle \frac{{\rm D}^{\rm ZJ}}{{\rm D} t}[\sigma], D \Bigr\rangle > 0 \qquad \forall \, D\in{\rm Sym}(3)\setminus\{0\} \end{equation} to show that for a given isotropic Cauchy-elastic constitutive law $B \mapsto \sigma(B)$ in terms of the left Cauchy-Green tensor $B = F F^T$, the induced fourth-order tangent stiffness tensor $\mathbb{H}^{\rm ZJ}(\sigma)$ is positive definite if and only if for $\widehat{\sigma}(\log B):=\sigma(B)$, the strong monotonicity condition (TSTS-M$^{++}$) in the logarithmic strain is satisfied. Thus (CSP) implies (TSTS-M^{++}) and vice-versa, and both imply the invertibility of the hypo-elastic material law between the stress and strain rates given by the tensor $\mathbb{H}^{\rm ZJ}(\sigma)$. The same characterization remains true for the corotational Green-Naghdi rate as well as the corotational logarithmic rate, conferring the corotational stability postulate (CSP) together with the monotonicity in the logarithmic strain tensor (TSTS-M^{++}) a far reaching generality. It is conjectured that this characterization of (CSP) holds for a large class of reasonable corotational rates. The result for the logarithmic rate is based on a novel chain rule for corotational derivatives of isotropic tensor functions.