Families of continuous spin tensors and applications in continuum mechanics

Abstract

A new method is proposed for generating families of continuous spin tensors associated with families of corotational rates of second-order tensors using isotropic tensor functions of the same tensor arguments and different forms of continuous antisymmetric scalar spin functions of scalar arguments. Tensor functions are represented in terms of eigenprojections of a symmetric tensor S, which is one of the arguments of these functions. Each member of the generated family is represented as the sum of some basic spin tensor associated with the basic corotational tensor rate and the above-mentioned tensor function, whose structure is matched to the structure of the tensor function required to construct the twirl tensor of the triad of orthonormal eigenvectors of the tensor S (but this twirl tensor itself does not belong to the family of continuous spin tensors). The developed method is used in continuum mechanics to generate two families of continuous spin tensors associated with two families of objective corotational rates: Lagrangian and Eulerian. In these families, isotropic tensor functions are constructed using Lagrangian and Eulerian tensor arguments of the kinematic type, respectively. It is shown that if the same scalar spin function is used in deriving tensor functions of Lagrangian and Eulerian tensor arguments, then the corotational tensor rates associated with the generated spin tensors are objective (Lagrangian and Eulerian) counterparts of each other. It is shown that the spin tensors associated with the classical Eulerian corotational tensor rates (Zaremba–Jaumann, Green–Naghdi, d-rate) and their Lagrangian counterparts (including material rate) belong to the generated families of continuous spin tensors. It is also shown that both of these families of continuous spin tensors are subfamilies of the families of material spin tensors derived by Xiao et al. (J Elast 52:1–41, 1998). It is noted that the twirl tensors of the Lagrangian and Eulerian triads associated with the Gurtin–Spear corotational rates of tensors belong to the families of material spin tensors but do not belong to the families of continuous spin tensors. The final section gives expressions of continuous spin tensors from families associated with the families of Lagrangian and Eulerian corotational tensor rates which are appropriate for applications.