Cavitation for incompressible anisotropic nonlinearly elastic spheres

Abstract

In this paper, the effect ofmaterial anisotropy on void nucleation and growth inincompressible nonlinearly elastic solids is examined. A bifurcation problem is considered for a solid sphere composed of an incompressible homogeneous nonlinearly elastic material which is transversely isotropic about the radial direction. Under a uniform radial tensile dead-load, a branch of radially symmetric configurations involving a traction-free internal cavity bifurcates from the undeformed configuration at sufficiently large loads. Closed form analytic solutions are obtained for a specific material model, which may be viewed as a generalization of the classic neo-Hookean model to anisotropic materials. In contrast to the situation for a neo-Hookean sphere, bifurcation here may occur locally either to the right (supercritical) or to the left (subcritical), depending on the degree of anisotropy. In the latter case, the cavity has finite radius on first appearance. Such a discontinuous change in stable equilibrium configurations is reminiscent of the snap-through buckling phenomenon of structural mechanics. Such dramatic cavitational instabilities were previously encountered by Antman and Negron-Marrero [3] for anisotropiccompressible solids and by Horgan and Pence [17] forcomposite incompressible spheres.