The equations of elastostatics in a Riemannian manifold (Q472940)

The authors study the deformation of an elastic body immersed in a Riemannian manifold \(M\) in response to applied body and surface forces. In the Introduction, the authors derive the equations of elastostatics from the principle of the least energy. The necessary notations and definitions are introduced in Section 2. In Section 3, the kinetic variables describing the deformation of an elastic body are defined, where the main novelty is the relation \(\varphi=\exp_{\varphi_0}\xi\equiv(\widehat{\exp}({\varphi_0}_{*}\xi))\circ \varphi_0 \) between the displacement field \(\xi\in C^1(TM)\) of a reference configuration \(\varphi_0(M)\) of the body and the relevant deformation \(\varphi:M \to N\) of the same body. In Section 4, a mathematical formulation is presented that the body is made of an elastic material. Section 5 deals with the modelling of external forces. In Section 6, a model of nonlinear elasticity is formulated first as a minimization problem, then by using variational equations, and finally as the boundary value problem: the deformation \(\varphi\) of the body must satisfy the system \[ -\text{div}\mathbf{T}[\varphi]=\mathbf{f}[\varphi]\;\text{in }\;\text{int}\; M, \quad \mathbf{T}[\varphi]_{\nu}=\mathbf{h}[\varphi]\;\text{on }\;\Gamma_2, \; \varphi=\varphi_0\;\text{on }\;\Gamma_1,\tag{1} \] where \(\Gamma_1\cup \Gamma_2=\Gamma\equiv \partial M\) denotes a measurable partition of the boundary \(\partial M\). In Section 7, the authors introduce a linearization of the stress tensor field \(\mathbf{T}[\varphi]\) with respect to the displacement field \(\xi\equiv \exp^{-1}_{\varphi_0}\xi\) of the reference configuration \(\varphi_0(M)\) of the body. Further, in Section 8, the existence and regularity theorems are proved for the equations of linearized elasticity in the Sobolev space \(\{\xi \in H^1(M); \xi=0 \; \text{on}\;\Gamma_1\}\). The existence of solutions to the equations of nonlinear elasticity (1) is proved in Section 9, first in the particular case \(\Gamma_1=\partial M\) under the assumption that the applied forces and the constitutive law of the elastic material are sufficiently regular. By the passage to an equivalent nonlinear integral equation, the existence of solutions to (1) is proved in the general case when the loads are sufficiently small.