Investigation of implicit constitutive relations in which both the stress and strain appear linearly, adjacent to non-penetrating cracks

Abstract

A novel class of implicit constitutive relations is studied, wherein the stress and the linearized strain appear linearly, that describe material response in elastic porous bodies like rocks, ceramics, concrete, cement, bones and metals. The constitutive relation is applied to a body with a crack subjected to non-penetration conditions between the opposite crack faces. To treat well-posedness of a corresponding variational inequality, we rely on a new approximation by thresholding dilatation and apply the Lions existence theorem on pseudo-monotone variational inequalities. An analytical solution to a specific example (without crack) under uniform triaxial loading is constructed, wherein blow-up can take place at a finite load, and this difficulty is overcome within a thresholding approximation so that blow-up does not occur.