Closed-form solutions, extremality and nonsmoothness criteria in a large deformation elasticity problem

The pure azimuthal shear problem for a circular cylindrical tube of nonlinearly elastic material, both isotropic and anisotropic, is examined on the basis of a complementary energy principle. For particular choices of strain-energy function, one convex and one nonconvex, closed-form solutions are obtained for this mixed boundary-value problem, for which the governing differential equation can be converted into an algebraic equation. The results for the non-convex strain energy function provide an illustration of a situation in which smooth analytic solutions of a nonlinear boundary-value problem are not global minimizers of the energy in the variational statement of the problem. Both the global minimizer and the local extrema are identified and the results are illustrated for particular values of the material parameters. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000). 74B20, 74P99.