In the previous chapter, the motion of a rigid body as a whole was discussed. For a body to be rigid, the distance between any set of two points in it is always constant. This does not happen in reality. But what does? To answer this question, we have to consider what, then, is a solid. Any material, fluid or solid, can support normal forces. These are forces directed perpendicular, or normal, to a material plane across which they act. The force per unit of area of that plane is called the normal stress. Water at the base of a pond, air in an automobile tire, the stones of a Roman arch, rocks at the base of a mountain, the skin of a pressurized airplane cabin, a stretched rubber band, and the bones of a runner all support force in that way (some only when the force is compressive).
A material is called solid rather than fluid if it can also support a substantial shearing force over the time scale of some natural process or technological application of interest. Shearing forces are directed parallel, rather than perpendicular, to the material surface on which they act; the force per unit of area is called shear stress. For example, consider a vertical metal rod that is fixed to a support at its upper end and has a weight attached at its lower end. If one considers a horizontal surface through the material of the rod, it will be evident that the rod supports normal stress. But it also supports shear stress, and this becomes evident when one considers the forces carried across a plane that is neither horizontal nor vertical through the rod. Thus, while water and air provide no long-term support of shear stress, granite, steel, and rubber normally do so and are therefore called solids. Materials with tightly bound atoms or molecules, such as the crystals formed below melting temperature by most substances or simple compounds and the amorphous structures formed in glass and many polymer substances at sufficiently low temperature, are usually considered solids.
The distinction between solids and fluids is not precise and in many cases will depend on the time scale. Consider the hot rocks of the Earth’s mantle. When a large earthquake occurs, an associated deformation disturbance called a seismic wave propagates through the adjacent rock, and the entire Earth is set into vibrations which, following a sufficiently large earthquake, may remain detectable with precise instruments for several weeks. The rocks of the mantle are then described as solid—as they would also be on the time scale of, say, tens to thousands of years, over which stresses rebuild enough in the source region to cause one or a few repetitions of the earthquake. But on a significantly longer time scale, say, on the order of a million years, the hot rocks of the mantle are unable to support shearing stresses and flow as a fluid. The substance called Silly Putty (trademark), a polymerized silicone gel familiar to many children, is another example. If a ball of it is left to sit on a table at room temperature, it flows and flattens on a time scale of a few minutes to an hour. But if picked up and tossed as a ball against a wall, so that large forces act only over the short time of the impact, the Silly Putty bounces back and retains its shape like a highly elastic solid.
Several types of solids can be distinguished according to their mechanical behaviour. In the simple but common case when a solid material is loaded at a sufficiently low temperature or short time scale, and with sufficiently limited stress magnitude, its deformation is fully recovered upon unloading. The material is then said to be elastic. But substances can also deform permanently, so that not all the deformation is recovered. For example, if one bends a metal coat hanger substantially and then releases the loading, it springs back only partially toward its initial shape; it does not fully recover but remains bent. The metal of the coat hanger has been permanently deformed, and in this case, for which the permanent deformation is not so much a consequence of longtime loading at sufficiently high temperature but more a consequence of subjecting the material to large stresses (above the yield stress), the permanent deformation is described as a plastic deformation and the material is called elastic-plastic. Permanent deformation of a sort that depends mainly on time of exposure to a stress—and that tends to increase significantly with time of exposure—is called viscous, or creep, deformation, and materials that exhibit those characteristics, as well as tendencies for elastic response, are called viscoelastic solids (or sometimes viscoplastic solids, when the permanent strain is emphasized rather than the tendency for partial recovery of strain upon unloading).
Solid mechanics has many applications. All those who seek to understand natural phenomena involving the stressing, deformation, flow, and fracture of solids, as well as all those who would have knowledge of such phenomena to improve living conditions and accomplish human objectives, have use for solid mechanics. The latter activities are, of course, the domain of engineering, and many important modern subfields of solid mechanics have been actively developed by engineering scientists concerned, for example, with mechanical, structural, materials, civil, or aerospace engineering. Natural phenomena involving solid mechanics are studied in geology, seismology, and tectonophysics, in materials science and the physics of condensed matter, and in some branches of biology and physiology. Furthermore, because solid mechanics poses challenging mathematical and computational problems, it (as well as fluid mechanics) has long been an important topic for applied mathematicians concerned, for example, with partial differential equations and with numerical techniques for digital computer formulations of physical problems.
Here is a sampling of some of the issues addressed using solid mechanics concepts: How do flows develop in Earth’s mantle and cause continents to move and ocean floors to subduct (i.e., be thrust) slowly beneath them? How do mountains form? What processes take place along a fault during an earthquake, and how do the resulting disturbances propagate through Earth as seismic waves, shaking, and perhaps collapsing, buildings and bridges? How do landslides occur? How does a structure on a clay soil settle with time, and what is the maximum bearing pressure that the footing of a building can exert on a soil or rock foundation without rupturing it? What materials should be chosen, and how should their proportion, shape, and loading be controlled, to make safe, reliable, durable, and economical structures—whether airframes, bridges, ships, buildings, chairs, artificial heart valves, or computer chips—and to make machinery such as jet engines, pumps, and bicycles? How do vehicles (cars, planes, ships) respond by vibration to the irregularity of surfaces or mediums along which they move, and how are vibrations controlled for comfort, noise reduction, and safety against fatigue failure? How rapidly does a crack grow in a cyclically loaded structure, whether a bridge, engine, or airplane wing or fuselage, and when will it propagate catastrophically? How can the deformability of structures during impact be controlled so as to design crashworthiness into vehicles? How are the materials and products of a technological civilization formed—e.g., by extruding metals or polymers through dies, rolling material into sheets, punching out complex shapes, and so on? By what microscopic processes do plastic and creep strains occur in polycrystals? How can different materials, such as fibre-reinforced composites, be fashioned together to achieve combinations of stiffness and strength needed in specific applications? What is the combination of material properties and overall response needed in downhill skis or in a tennis racket? How does the human skull respond to impact in an accident? How do heart muscles control the pumping of blood in the human body, and what goes wrong when an aneurysm develops?
Solid mechanics developed in the outpouring of mathematical and physical studies following the great achievement of Newton in stating the laws of motion, although it has earlier roots. The need to understand and control the fracture of solids seems to have been a first motivation. Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks a possible test of the tensile strength of a wire. Galileo, who died in the year of Newton’s birth (1642), investigated the breaking loads of rods under tension and concluded that the load was independent of length and proportional to the cross section area, this being a first step toward a concept of stress. He also investigated the breaking loads on beams that were suspended horizontally from a wall into which they were built.
The English scientist Robert Hooke discovered in 1660, but published only in 1678, that for many materials the displacement under a load was proportional to force, thus establishing the notion of (linear) elasticity but not yet in a way that was expressible in terms of stress and strain. Edme Mariotte in France published similar discoveries in 1680 and, in addition, reached an understanding of how beams like those studied by Galileo resist transverse loadings—or, more precisely, resist the torques caused by those transverse loadings—by developing extensional and compressional deformations, respectively, in material fibres along their upper and lower portions. It was for the Swiss mathematician and mechanician Jakob Bernoulli to observe, in the final paper of his life, in 1705, that the proper way of describing deformation was to give force per unit area, or stress, as a function of the elongation per unit length, or strain, of a material fibre under tension. The Swiss mathematician and mechanician Leonhard Euler, who was taught mathematics by Jakob’s brother Johann Bernoulli, proposed, among many contributions, a linear relation between stress σ and strain ε, in 1727, of the form σ = Eε, where the coefficient E is now generally called Young’s modulus after the British naturalist Thomas Young, who developed a related idea in 1807.
The notion that there is an internal tension acting across surfaces in a deformed solid was expressed by the German mathematician and physicist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1684 and Jakob Bernoulli in 1691. Also, Jakob Bernoulli and Euler introduced the idea that at a given section along the length of a beam there were internal tensions amounting to a net force and a net torque. Euler introduced the idea of compressive normal stress as the pressure in a fluid in 1752. The French engineer and physicist Charles-Augustin Coulomb was apparently the first to relate the theory of a beam as a bent elastic line to stress and strain in an actual beam, in a way never quite achieved by Bernoulli and, although possibly recognized, never published by Euler. He developed the famous expression σ = My/I for the stress due to the pure bending of a homogenous linear elastic beam; here M is the torque, or bending moment, y is the distance of a point from an axis that passes through the section centroid, parallel to the torque axis, and I is the integral of y2 over the section area. The French mathematician Antoine Parent introduced the concept of shear stress in 1713, but Coulomb was the one who extensively developed the idea, first in connection with beams and with the stressing and failure of soil in 1773 and then in studies of frictional slip in 1779.
It was the great French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy, originally educated as an engineer, who in 1822 formalized the concept of stress in the context of a generalized three-dimensional theory, showed its properties as consisting of a 3 × 3 symmetric array of numbers that transform as a tensor, derived the equations of motion for a continuum in terms of the components of stress, and developed the theory of linear elastic response for isotropic solids. As part of his work in this area, Cauchy also introduced the equations that express the six components of strain (three extensional and three shear) in terms of derivatives of displacements for the case in which all those derivatives are much smaller than unity; similar expressions had been given earlier by Euler in expressing rates of straining in terms of the derivatives of the velocity field in a fluid.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy. SSPL via Getty Images
The 1700s and early 1800s were a productive period during which the mechanics of simple elastic structural elements were developed—well before the beginnings in the 1820s of the general three-dimensional theory. The development of beam theory by Euler, who generally modeled beams as elastic lines that resist bending, as well as by several members of the Bernoulli family and by Coulomb, remains among the most immediately useful aspects of solid mechanics, in part for its simplicity and in part because of the pervasiveness of beams and columns in structural technology. Jakob Bernoulli proposed in his final paper of 1705 that the curvature of a beam was proportional to its bending moment. Euler in 1744 and Johann’s son, Daniel Bernoulli, in 1751 used the theory to address the transverse vibrations of beams, and in 1757 Euler gave his famous analysis of the buckling of an initially straight beam subjected to a compressive loading; such a beam is commonly called a column. Following a suggestion of Daniel Bernoulli in 1742, Euler in 1744 introduced the concept of strain energy per unit length for a beam and showed that it is proportional to the square of the beam’s curvature. Euler regarded the total strain energy as the quantity analogous to the potential energy of a discrete mechanical system. By adopting procedures that were becoming familiar in analytical mechanics and following from the principle of virtual work as introduced in 1717 by Johann Bernoulli for such discrete systems as pin-connected rigid bodies, Euler rendered the energy stationary and in this way developed the calculus of variations as an approach to the equations of equilibrium and motion of elastic structures.
That same variational approach played a major role in the development by French mathematicians in the early 1800s of a theory of small transverse displacements and vibrations of elastic plates. This theory was developed in preliminary form by Sophie Germain and was also worked on by Siméon-Denis Poisson in the early 1810s; they considered a flat plate as an elastic plane that resists curvature. Claude-Louis-Marie Navier gave a definitive development of the correct energy expression and governing differential equation a few years later. An uncertainty of some duration arose in the theory from the fact that the final partial differential equation for the transverse displacement is such that it is impossible to prescribe, simultaneously, along an unsupported edge of the plate, both the twisting moment per unit length of middle surface and the transverse shear force per unit length. This was finally resolved in 1850 by the Prussian physicist Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, who applied virtual work and variational calculus procedures in the framework of simplifying kinematic assumptions that fibres initially perpendicular to the plate’s middle surface remain so after deformation of that surface.
The first steps in the theory of thin shells were taken by Euler in the 1770s; he addressed the deformation of an initially curved beam as an elastic line and provided a simplified analysis of the vibration of an elastic bell as an array of annular beams. Johann’s grandson, Jakob Bernoulli “the Younger,” further developed this model in the last year of his life as a two-dimensional network of elastic lines, but he could not develop an acceptable treatment. Shell theory did not attract attention again until a century after Euler’s work. The first consideration of shells from a three-dimensional elastic viewpoint was advanced by Hermann Aron in 1873. Acceptable thin-shell theories for general situations, appropriate for cases of small deformation, were then developed by the British mathematician, mechanician, and geophysicist Augustus Edward Hough Love in 1888 and by the British mathematician and physicist Horace Lamb in 1890 (there is no uniquely correct theory, as the Dutch applied mechanician and engineer W.T. Koiter and the Soviet mechanician V.V. Novozhilov clarified in the 1950s; the difference between predictions of acceptable theories is small when the ratio of shell thickness to a typical length scale is small). Shell theory remained of immense interest well beyond the mid-1900s, in part because so many problems lay beyond the linear theory (rather small transverse displacements often dramatically alter the way that a shell supports load by a combination of bending and membrane action) and in part because of the interest in such lightweight structural forms for aeronautical technology.
Linear elasticity as a general three-dimensional theory began to be developed in the early 1820s based on Cauchy’s work. Simultaneously, Navier had developed an elasticity theory based on a simple corpuscular, or particle, model of matter in which particles interacted with their neighbours by a central force attraction between particle pairs. As was gradually realized, following work by Navier, Cauchy, and Poisson in the 1820s and ’30s, the particle model is too simple and makes predictions concerning relations among elastic moduli that are not met by experiment. Most of the subsequent development of this subject was in terms of the continuum theory. Controversies concerning the maximum possible number of independent elastic moduli in the most general anisotropic solid were settled by the British mathematician George Green in 1837. Green pointed out that the existence of an elastic strain energy required that of the 36 elastic constants relating the 6 stress components to the 6 strains, at most 21 could be independent. The Scottish physicist Lord Kelvin put this consideration on sounder ground in 1855 as part of his development of macroscopic thermodynamics, showing that a strain energy function must exist for reversible isothermal or adiabatic (isentropic) response and working out such results as the (very modest) temperature changes associated with isentropic elastic deformation.
The middle and late 1800s were a period in which many basic elastic solutions were derived and applied to technology and to the explanation of natural phenomena. The French mathematician Adhémar-Jean-Claude Barré de Saint-Venant derived in the 1850s solutions for the torsion of noncircular cylinders, which explained the necessity of warping displacement of the cross section in the direction parallel to the axis of twisting, and for the flexure of beams due to transverse loadings; the latter allowed understanding of approximations inherent in the simple beam theory of Jakob Bernoulli, Euler, and Coulomb. The German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz developed solutions for the deformation of elastic solids as they are brought into contact and applied these to model details of impact collisions. Solutions for stress and displacement due to concentrated forces acting at an interior point of a full space were derived by Kelvin, and those on the surface of a half space by the French mathematician Joseph Valentin Boussinesq and the Italian mathematician Valentino Cerruti. The Prussian mathematician Leo August Pochhammer analyzed the vibrations of an elastic cylinder, and Lamb and the Prussian physicist Paul Jaerisch derived the equations of general vibration of an elastic sphere in the 1880s, an effort that was continued by many seismologists in the 1900s to describe the vibrations of Earth. In 1863 Kelvin had derived the basic form of the solution of the static elasticity equations for a spherical solid, and these were applied in following years to such problems as calculating the deformation of Earth due to rotation and tidal forcing and measuring the effects of elastic deformability on the motions of Earth’s rotation axis.
The classical development of elasticity never fully confronted the problem of finite elastic straining, in which material fibres change their lengths by other than very small amounts. Possibly this was because the common materials of construction would remain elastic only for very small strains before exhibiting either plastic straining or brittle failure. However, natural polymeric materials show elasticity over a far wider range (usually also with enough time or rate effects that they would more accurately be characterized as viscoelastic), and the widespread use of natural rubber and similar materials motivated the development of finite elasticity. While many roots of the subject were laid in the classical theory, especially in the work of Green, Gabrio Piola, and Kirchhoff in the mid-1800s, the development of a viable theory with forms of stress-strain relations for specific rubbery elastic materials, as well as an understanding of the physical effects of the nonlinearity in simple problems such as torsion and bending, was mainly the achievement of the British-born engineer and applied mathematician Ronald S. Rivlin in the 1940s and ’50s.
Poisson, Cauchy, and George G. Stokes showed that the equations of the general theory of elasticity predicted the existence of two types of elastic deformation waves which could propagate through isotropic elastic solids. These are called body waves. In the faster type, called longitudinal, dilational, or irrotational waves, the particle motion is in the same direction as that of wave propagation; in the slower type, called transverse, shear, or rotational waves, it is perpendicular to the propagation direction. No analogue of the shear wave exists for propagation through a fluid medium, and that fact led seismologists in the early 1900s to understand that Earth has a liquid core (at the centre of which there is a solid inner core).
Lord Rayleigh showed in 1885 that there is a wave type that could propagate along surfaces, such that the motion associated with the wave decayed exponentially with distance into the material from the surface. This type of surface wave, now called a Rayleigh wave, propagates typically at slightly more than 90 percent of the shear wave speed and involves an elliptical path of particle motion that lies in planes parallel to that defined by the normal to the surface and the propagation direction. Another type of surface wave, with motion transverse to the propagation direction and parallel to the surface, was found by Love for solids in which a surface layer of material sits atop an elastically stiffer bulk solid; this defines the situation for Earth’s crust. The shaking in an earthquake is communicated first to distant places by body waves, but these spread out in three dimensions and to conserve the energy propagated by the wave field must diminish in their displacement amplitudes as r-1, where r is the distance from the source. The surface waves spread out in only two dimensions and must, for the same reason, diminish only as fast as r-½. Thus, the shaking effect of the surface waves from a crustal earthquake is normally felt more strongly, and is potentially more damaging, at moderate to large distances. Indeed, well before the theory of waves in solids was in hand, Thomas Young had suggested in his 1807 lectures on natural philosophy that the shaking of an earthquake “is probably propagated through the earth in the same manner as noise is conveyed through air.” (It had been suggested by the American mathematician and astronomer John Winthrop, following his experience of the Boston-area earthquake of 1755, that the ground shaking was due to a disturbance propagated like sound through the air.)
With the development of ultrasonic transducers operated on piezoelectric principles, the measurement of the reflection and scattering of elastic waves has developed into an effective engineering technique for the nondestructive evaluation of materials for detection of such potentially dangerous defects as cracks. Also, very strong impacts, whether from meteorite collision, weaponry, or blasting and the like in technological endeavours, induce waves in which material response can be well outside the range of linear elasticity, involving any or all of finite elastic strain, plastic or viscoplastic response, and phase transformation. These are called shock waves; they can propagate much beyond the speed of linear elastic waves and are accompanied by significant heating.
In 1898 G. Kirsch derived the solution for the stress distribution around a circular hole in a much larger plate under remotely uniform tensile stress. The same solution can be adapted to the tunnel-like cylindrical cavity of a circular section in a bulk solid. Kirsch’s solution showed a significant concentration of stress at the boundary, by a factor of three when the remote stress was uniaxial tension. Then in 1907 the Russian mathematician Gury Vasilyevich Kolosov, and independently in 1914 the British engineer Charles Edward Inglis, derived the analogous solution for stresses around an elliptical hole. Their solution showed that the concentration of stress could become far greater, as the radius of curvature at an end of the hole becomes small compared with the overall length of the hole. These results provided the insight to sensitize engineers to the possibility of dangerous stress concentrations at sharp reentrant corners, notches, cutouts, keyways, screw threads, and similar openings in structures for which the nominal stresses were at otherwise safe levels. Such stress concentration sites are places from which a crack can nucleate.
The elliptical hole of Kolosov and Inglis defines a crack in the limit when one semimajor axis goes to zero, and the Inglis solution was adopted by the British aeronautical engineer A.A. Griffith in 1921 to describe a crack in a brittle solid. In that work Griffith made his famous proposition that a spontaneous crack growth would occur when the energy released from the elastic field just balanced the work required to separate surfaces in the solid. Following a hesitant beginning, in which Griffith’s work was initially regarded as important only for very brittle solids such as glass, there developed, largely under the impetus of the American engineer and physicist George R. Irwin, a major body of work on the mechanics of crack growth and fracture, including fracture by fatigue and stress corrosion cracking, starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the 1990s. This was driven initially by the cracking of a number of American Liberty ships during World War II, by the failures of the British Comet airplane, and by a host of reliability and safety issues arising in aerospace and nuclear reactor technology. The new complexion of the subject extended beyond the Griffith energy theory and, in its simplest and most widely employed version in engineering practice, used Irwin’s stress intensity factor as the basis for predicting crack growth response under service loadings in terms of laboratory data that is correlated in terms of that factor. That stress intensity factor is the coefficient of a characteristic singularity in the linear elastic solution for the stress field near a crack tip; it is recognized as providing a proper characterization of crack tip stressing in many cases, even though the linear elastic solution must be wrong in detail near the crack tip owing to nonelastic material response, large strain, and discreteness of material microstructure.
The Italian elastician and mathematician Vito Volterra introduced in 1905 the theory of the elastostatic stress and displacement fields created by dislocating solids. This involves making a cut in a solid, displacing its surfaces relative to one another by some fixed amount, and joining the sides of the cut back together, filling in with material as necessary. The initial status of this work was simply regarded as an interesting way of generating elastic fields, but, in the early 1930s, Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, Egon Orowan, and Michael Polanyi realized that just such a process could be going on in ductile crystals and could provide an explanation of the low plastic shear strength of typical ductile solids, much as Griffith’s cracks explained low fracture strength under tension. In this case, the displacement on the dislocated surface corresponds to one atomic lattice spacing in the crystal. It quickly became clear that this concept provided the correct microscopic description of metal plasticity, and, starting with Taylor in the 1930s and continuing into the 1990s, the use of solid mechanics to explore dislocation interactions and the microscopic basis of plastic flow in crystalline materials has been a major topic, with many distinguished contributors.
The mathematical techniques advanced by Volterra are now in common use by earth scientists in explaining ground displacement and deformation induced by tectonic faulting. Also, the first elastodynamic solutions for the rapid motion of crystal dislocations, developed by South African materials scientist F.R.N. Nabarro in the early 1950s, were quickly adapted by seismologists to explain the radiation from propagating slip distributions on faults. The Japanese seismologist H. Nakano had already shown in 1923 how to represent the distant waves radiated by an earthquake as the elastodynamic response to a pair of force dipoles amounting to zero net torque. (All his manuscripts were destroyed in the fire in Tokyo associated with the great Kwanto earthquake in that same year, but copies of some had been sent to Western colleagues and the work survived.)
The macroscopic theory of plastic flow has a history nearly as old as that of elasticity. While in the microscopic theory of materials, the word “plasticity” is usually interpreted as denoting deformation by dislocation processes, in macroscopic continuum mechanics it is taken to denote any type of permanent deformation of materials, especially those of a type for which time or rate of deformation effects are not the most dominant feature of the phenomenon (the terms viscoplasticity, creep, or viscoelasticity are usually used in such cases). Coulomb’s work of 1773 on the frictional yielding of soils under shear and normal stress has been mentioned; yielding denotes the occurrence of large shear deformations without significant increase in applied stress. His results were used to explain the pressure of soils against retaining walls and footings in the work of the French mathematician and engineer Jean Victor Poncelet in 1840 and the Scottish engineer and physicist William John Macquorn Rankine in 1853. The inelastic deformation of soils and rocks often takes place in situations for which the deforming mass is infiltrated by groundwater, and Austrian-American civil engineer Karl Terzaghi in the 1920s developed the concept of effective stress, whereby the stresses that enter a criterion of yielding or failure are not the total stresses applied to the saturated soil or rock mass but rather the effective stresses, which are the difference between the total stresses and those of a purely hydrostatic stress state with pressure equal to that in the pore fluid. Terzaghi also introduced the concept of consolidation, in which the compression of a fluid-saturated soil can take place only as the fluid slowly flows through the pore space under pressure gradients, according to Darcy’s law; this effect accounts for the time-dependent settlement of constructions over clay soils.
Apart from the earlier observation of plastic flow at large stresses in the tensile testing of bars, the theory of continuum plasticity for metallic materials begins with Henri Edouard Tresca in 1864. His experiments on the compression and indentation of metals led him to propose that this type of plasticity, in contrast to that in soils, was essentially independent of the average normal stress in the material and dependent only on shear stresses, a feature later rationalized by the dislocation mechanism. Tresca proposed a yield criterion for macroscopically isotropic metal polycrystals based on the maximum shear stress in the material, and that was used by Saint-Venant to solve an early elastic-plastic problem, that of the partly plastic cylinder in torsion, and also to solve for the stresses in a completely plastic tube under pressure.
The German applied mechanician Ludwig Prandtl developed the rudiments of the theory of plane plastic flow in 1920 and 1921, with an analysis of indentation of a ductile solid by a flat-ended rigid indenter, and the resulting theory of plastic slip lines was completed by H. Hencky in 1923 and Hilda Geiringer in 1930. Additional developments include the methods of plastic limit analysis, which allowed engineers to directly calculate upper and lower bounds to the plastic collapse loads of structures or to forces required in metal forming. Those methods developed gradually over the early 1900s on a largely intuitive basis, first for simple beam structures and later for plates, and were put on a rigorous basis within the rapidly developing mathematical theory of plasticity about 1950 by Daniel C. Drucker and William Prager in the United States and Rodney Hill in Great Britain.
The Austrian-American applied mathematician Richard von Mises proposed in 1913 that a mathematically simpler theory of plasticity than that based on the Tresca yield criterion could be based on the second tensor invariant of the deviatoric stresses (i.e., of the total stresses minus those of a hydrostatic state in which pressure is equal to the average normal stress over all planes). An equivalent yield criterion had been proposed independently by the Polish engineer Maksymilian Tytus Huber. The Mises theory incorporates a proposal by M. Levy in 1871 that components of the plastic strain increment tensor are in proportion to one another just as are the components of deviatoric stress. This criterion was generally found to provide slightly better agreement with experiment than did that of Tresca, and most work on the application of plasticity theory uses this form. Following a suggestion of Prandtl, E. Reuss completed the theory in 1930 by adding an elastic component of strain increments, related to stress increments in the same way as for linear elastic response. This formulation was soon generalized to include strain hardening, whereby the value of the second invariant for continued yielding increases with ongoing plastic deformation, and was extended to high-temperature creep response in metals or other hot solids by assuming that the second invariant of the plastic (now generally called “creep”) strain rate is a function of that same invariant of the deviatoric stress, typically a power law type with Arrhenius temperature dependence.
This formulation of plastic and viscoplastic, or creep, response has been applied to all manner of problems in materials and structural technology and in flow of geologic masses. Representative problems addressed include the growth and subsequent coalescence of microscopic voids in the ductile fracture of metals, the theory of the indentation hardness test, the extrusion of metal rods and rolling of metal sheets, design against collapse of ductile steel structures, estimation of the thickness of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and modeling the geologic evolution of the Plateau of Tibet. Other types of elastic-plastic theories intended for analysis of ductile single crystals originate from the work of G.I. Taylor and Hill and base the criterion for yielding on E. Schmid’s concept from the 1920s of a critical resolved shear stress along a crystal slip plane, in the direction of an allowed slip on that plane; this sort of yield condition has approximate support from the dislocation theory of plasticity.
The German physicist Wilhelm Weber noticed in 1835 that a load applied to a silk thread produced not only an immediate extension but also a continuing elongation of the thread with time. This type of viscoelastic response is especially notable in polymeric solids but is present to some extent in all types of solids and often does not have a clear separation from what could be called viscoplastic, or creep, response. In general, if all of the strain is ultimately recovered when a load is removed from a body, the response is termed viscoelastic, but the term is also used in cases for which sustained loading leads to strains that are not fully recovered. The Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann developed in 1874 the theory of linear viscoelastic stress-strain relations. In their most general form, these involve the notion that a step loading (a suddenly imposed stress that is subsequently maintained constant) causes an immediate strain followed by a time-dependent strain which, for different materials, either may have a finite limit at long time or may increase indefinitely with time. Within the assumption of linearity, the strain at time t in response to a general time-dependent stress history σ(t) can then be written as the sum (or integral) of terms that involve the step-loading strain response due to a step loading dt′dσ(t′)/dt′ at time t′. The theory of viscoelasticity is important for consideration of the attenuation of stress waves and the damping of vibrations.
A new class of problems arose with the mechanics of very-long-molecule polymers, which do not have significant cross-linking and exist either in solution or as a melt. These are fluids in the sense that they cannot long support shear stress, but at the same time they have remarkable properties like those of finitely deformed elastic solids. A famous demonstration is to pour one of these fluids slowly from a beaker and to cut the flowing stream suddenly with scissors; if the cut is not too far below the place of exit from the beaker, the stream of falling fluid immediately contracts elastically and returns to the beaker. The molecules are elongated during flow but tend to return to their thermodynamically preferred coiled configuration when forces are removed.
The theory of such materials came under intense development in the 1950s after the British applied mathematician James Gardner Oldroyd showed in 1950 how viscoelastic stress-strain relations of a memory type could be generalized to a flowing fluid. This requires that the constitutive relation, or rheological relation, between the stress history and the deformation history at a material “point” be properly invariant to a superposed history of rigid rotation, which should not affect the local physics determining that relation (the resulting Coriolis and centrifugal effects are quite negligible at the scale of molecular interactions). Important contributions on this issue were made by the applied mathematicians Stanisław Zaremba and Gustav Andreas Johannes Jaumann in the first decade of the 1900s; they showed how to make tensorial definitions of stress rate that were invariant to superposed spin and thus were suitable for use in constitutive relations. But it was only during the 1950s that these concepts found their way into the theory of constitutive relations for general viscoelastic materials; independently, a few years later, properly invariant stress rates were adopted in continuum formulations of elastic-plastic response.
The digital computer revolutionized the practice of many areas of engineering and science, and solid mechanics was among the first fields to benefit from its impact. Many computational techniques have been used in this field, but the one that emerged by the end of 1970s as, by far, the most widely adopted is the finite-element method. This method was outlined by the mathematician Richard Courant in 1943 and was developed independently, and put to practical use on computers, in the mid-1950s by the aeronautical structures engineers M.J. Turner, Ray W. Clough, Harold Clifford Martin, and LeRoy J. Topp in the United States and J.H. Argyris and Sydney Kelsey in Britain. Their work grew out of earlier attempts at systematic structural analysis for complex frameworks of beam elements. The method was soon recast in a variational framework and related to earlier efforts at deriving approximate solutions of problems described by variational principles. The new technique involved substituting trial functions of unknown amplitude into the variational functional, which is then rendered stationary as an algebraic function of the amplitude coefficients. In the most common version of the finite-element method, the domain to be analyzed is divided into cells, or elements, and the displacement field within each element is interpolated in terms of displacements at a few points around the element boundary (and sometimes within it) called nodes. The interpolation is done so that the displacement field is continuous across element boundaries for any choice of the nodal displacements. The strain at every point can thus be expressed in terms of nodal displacements, and it is then required that the stresses associated with these strains, through the stress-strain relations of the material, satisfy the principle of virtual work for arbitrary variation of the nodal displacements. This generates as many simultaneous equations as there are degrees of freedom in the finite element model, and numerical techniques for solving such systems of equations are programmed for computer solution.