A Geometric Theory of Surface Elasticity and Anelasticity

Abstract In this paper we formulate a geometric theory of elasticity and anelasticity for bodies containing material surfaces with their own elastic energies and distributed surface eigenstrains. Bulk elasticity is formulated in the language of Riemannian geometry, and the framework is extended to material surfaces by using the differential geometry of hypersurfaces in Riemannian manifolds. Within this setting, surface kinematics, surface strain measures, surface material metric, and the induced second fundamental form follow naturally from the embedding of the material surface in the material manifold. The classical theory of surface elasticity of Gurtin and Murdoch (Arch Ration Mech Anal 57(4):291–323, 1975) is revisited and reformulated in this geometric framework and then extended to anelastic bodies with anelastic material surfaces. Constitutive equations for isotropic and anisotropic material surfaces are formulated systematically, and bulk and surface anelasticity are introduced by replacing the elastic metrics with their anelastic counterparts. The balance laws are derived variationally using the Lagrange–d’Alembert principle. These include the bulk balance of linear momentum together with the surface balance of linear momentum, whose normal component gives a generalized Laplace’s law. As an application, we obtain the complete solution for a spherical incompressible isotropic solid ball containing a cavity filled with a compressible hyperelastic fluid, where the cavity boundary is an anelastic material surface with distributed surface eigenstrains. The analytical and numerical results quantify the effects of surface and fluid eigenstrains on the pressure-stretch response and residual stress.