Use both material isotropy and material frame indifference. The polar decomposition in continuum mechanics writes , where is the left stretch tensor. Isotropy removes the reference rotation: . Choose an orthonormal eigenbasis of . A half-turn about any principal axis leaves fixed but reverses appropriate off-diagonal entries of . Frame indifference therefore makes those entries zero. If a principal stretch is repeated, rotations in its eigenspace additionally force the stress to be isotropic there. Thus the principal stresses share the stretch axes: this proves coaxiality of isotropic elastic stress with and with .
For simple shear, the left Cauchy-Green deformation tensor is
Its principal axes make an angle with the coordinate axes satisfying when . If the two principal stresses are , rotating their diagonal matrix back gives
Consequently the universal simple-shear normal-stress identity is
Equivalently, it follows immediately from the off-diagonal entry of . At , the undeformed material has isotropic stress, so the identity holds there too. No particular elastic constitutive equation has been used.
Figure 1.
Principal stress and stretch axes of an isotropic elastic material under simple shear
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