Material affine connections for growing solids (Q2214337)

The paper provides a geometric description of simple materials and growing solids with a special focus on their homogeneity properties. The aim of the authors is to address a very important issue in continuum mechanics: Are first gradient models (simple materials) of elastic solids sufficient for a consistent description of deformable bodies? The paper is divided into 6 sections. Sections 2 and 3 provide a condensed but exhaustive summary of the main ingredients of Geometrical Mechanics of Continuum. The content is not very detailed, and, consequently, the reading can be very difficult if one is not familiar with the language and constructions of differential geometry. However the authors provide a physical interpretation of every mathematical object in order to motivate the use of all this geometrical machinery. In particular, this introduction focuses on the description of homogeneity in geometrical terms. Structurally inhomogeneous materials are defined as simple materials which do not possess a uniform configuration. Then a crucial observation is that a similar description can be adopted for growing bodies, too. In this case there is a one parameter family of uniform references and material bodies labelled by a continuous parameter associated with the growing process. These bodies describe the layers which step by step are added to the initial configuration. Even if the initial configuration is supposed to be homogeneous, the final will not be so: the growing process, indeed, will result in a structural inhomogeneous material. After this review, the core of the paper consists of Section 4, 5 and 6 where three different material connections are constructed for simple materials with a given uniform reference. In the first case, the material connection is introduced as the Levi-Civita connection of a suitable metric tensor (Riemannian material manifold): the curvature can be non-zero, but torsion and nonmetricity tensor are. In the second case, a Weitzenböck connection is constructed, which has non-vanishing torsion but zero curvature and nonmetricity tensor. The final case is the Weyl connection which is determined by a certain nonmetricity tensor and a one-form. Following the Cartan approach to connections in terms of moving frames, some structural equations are proved in Sections 5 and 6 torsion and curvature are interpreted as densities of defects. Since all these descriptions are compatible with the assumption of simple materials, the authors' answer to their initial question is that first gradient models are not sufficient for the description of self-stressed materials including defects: In this case they should be completed in the framework of second gradient models, for instance. A final appendix contains basic notions of Riemannian geometry and connection theory: This further shows that the authors paid a lot of attention in the organization of the paper. It is, indeed, well structured with a lot of sections and subsections which provide natural pauses during the reading. The English style should have been improved, especially concerning the use of articles and prepositions. The list of references is complete and allows the interested reader to fill the missing information.