A note on elastic energy density functions for largely deformed compressible rubber solid (Q1108117)

This interesting and well written paper deals with the compressibility of rubberlike materials. Experiments show that rubber is nearly incompressible. The analytic treatment of deformation and corresponding stresses is tremendously simplified by neglecting the compressibility completely. But even with this idealization, only a limited number of problems can be solved analytically. Therefore, numerical solutions are indispensable. For numerical procedures, however, incompressibility is detrimental since the stored energy function lacks positive-definiteness. For the purpose of numerical calculation, the authors generalize the most familiar strain energy functions to allow for compressibility and propose smallest tolerable bulk moduli.