COMPUTATIONAL SIMULATION OF CONTINUA WITH ISOTROPIC SURFACE POTENTIALS
A. Javili, P. Steinmann
Abstract
Common modeling in continuum mechanics takes exclusively the bulk into account, nevertheless, neglecting possible contributions from the boundary. However, surface effects sometimes play a dominant role in the material behavior, the most prominent example being surface tension. Within this contribution surface potentials at the boundary are allowed, in general, to depend not only on the boundary deformation but also on the boundary deformation gradient. Motivated by this idea, a suitable finite element framework based on rank deficient deformation gradients is established. In essence, the total potential energy functional that we seek to minimize with respect to all admissible spatial variations at fixed material placement is consisting of both contributions from the bulk and the boundary.
