Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-solid-mechanics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2008/2/solution

Cauchy's stress hypothesis says that traction across a cut depends locally on its point, time and oriented normal, rather than on the global shape of the cut. Here all areas and normals are referential: is a fixed material region in reference coordinates, its mass density per reference volume, the current particle velocity, body force per unit mass, and force per unit reference area. The time derivative on the left is total material momentum rate; the two right terms are contact and body forces.
A shrinking pillbox gives . In a shrinking tetrahedron the volume contributions scale as its linear size cubed, whereas face forces scale as size squared. Their leading balance expresses traction on an arbitrary face as the normal-component-weighted sum of tractions on three coordinate faces. Defining those three tractions as tensor columns gives . Applying the divergence theorem to momentum balance and localizing over arbitrary then yields
The referential tensor is the first Piola-Kirchhoff stress and need not be symmetric; it should not be silently identified with the spatial Cauchy stress.
Incompressibility is . For a homogeneous hyperelastic material the referential constitutive relation becomes
where the undetermined scalar pressure enforces the constraint. Homogeneity removes explicit reference-position dependence from , not the possible spatial variation of that pressure.
For the neo-Hookean energy, . For the positive diagonal ansatz the nominal principal stresses are . Since is constant, equilibrium requires , so is constant. Stress-free endfaces give . The side normals include and , so their prescribed tractions force .
For fixed positive , the scalar function is strictly increasing on . Thus equality of the two nominal stresses implies . Incompressibility gives , and substitution gives
The load function has derivative , tends to minus infinity as and to infinity as . It therefore determines exactly one positive for every specified load, with for outward tensile . The resulting constant stress satisfies equilibrium and every prescribed face traction, proving existence and uniqueness within the requested positive diagonal class. It does not claim uniqueness among all possible nonhomogeneous deformations. This is the equibiaxial dead loading of a neo-Hookean prism.

New to topics? Read the docs here!