Universal Displacements in Anisotropic Linear Cauchy Elasticity

Abstract

Universal displacements are those displacements that can be maintained for any member of a specific class of linear elastic materials in the absence of body forces, solely by applying boundary tractions. For linear hyperelastic (Green elastic) solids, it is known that the space of universal displacements explicitly depends on the symmetry group of the material, and moreover, the larger the symmetry group the larger the set of universal displacements. Linear Cauchy elastic solids, which include linear hyperelastic solids as a special case, do not necessarily have an underlying energy function. Consequently, their elastic constants do not possess the major symmetries. In this paper, we characterize the universal displacements of anisotropic linear Cauchy elasticity. We prove the result that for each symmetry class, the set of universal displacements of linear Cauchy elasticity is identical to that of linear hyperelasticity.