The significance of projection operators in the spectral representation of symmetric second order tensors (Q809649)

Recently there has been renewed interest in the problem of finding explicit expressions for isotropic tensor functions of a symmetric second order tensor \({\mathbb{C}}\). Some of this interest has been motivated by the desire to find an expression for the rotation tensor in continuum mechanics, while other interest has been motivated by the desire to use generalized strain measures in elasticity. \textit{K. N. Morman} [J. Appl. Mech. 53, 726-728 (1986)] considered the case of a symmetric tensor on a three-dimensional space and developed explicit expressions for the basis tensors (tensor products of the eigenvectors with themselves) which form the basis of the spectral representation. Specific attention was given to changes in the spectral representation when the problem of repeated eigenvalues occurs. The present work generalizes previous results to the case of a symmetric second order tensor \({\mathbb{C}}\) on an N-dimensional Euclidean space. Perhaps the most important new aspect of the present work is the introduction of explicit expressions for projection operators which account for repeated eigenvalues with no difficulties. This procedure shows that when repeated eigenvalues occur, it is only necessary to calculate powers of \({\mathbb{C}}\) up to \({\mathbb{C}}^{K-1}\), where K is the number of distinct eigenvalues.