Characteristic distribution: an application to material bodies (Q1745679)

The authors start from a known fact, namely, for any simple material body B there exists a groupoid (denoted by \(\Omega(B)\)) over \(B\), called the material groupoid of \(B\). The groupoid \(\Omega(B)\) consists of all linear isomorphisms between the two tangent spaces. Also, a material body is simple (or of grade 1) if the mechanical response functional at each point depends on the deformation gradient alone and not on higher gradients. The uniformity of the material body \(B\) is reflected on the properties of the material groupoid \(\Omega(B)\). For instance, B is uniform if, and only if, \(\Omega(B)\) is a transitive Lie subgroupoid of the so-called 1-jets groupoid on \(B\). For any subgroupoid of a Lie groupoid, the authors construct a generalized distribution generated by the (local) leftinvariant vector fields on the groupoid which is called the characteristic distribution of the \(\Gamma\) groupoid. This helps the author to use the results in Continuum Mechanics. So, a simple material body can be covered by a foliation of some kind of smoothly uniform subbodies, called material submanifolds. However, here the term subbodies are not exactly subbodies in the usual sense of Continuum Mechanics. To highlight the usefulness of the results, a series of results are given in the last part of the paper. So, the authors give the decomposition of the material by smoothly uniform material submanifolds provided by the characteristic distribution. This kind of examples justify the study of groupoids without structure of Lie groupoids.