Saint-Venant End Effects for Incremental Plane Deformations of Incompressible Nonlinearly Elastic Materials

This paper is concerned with assessing the extent of Saint-Venant end effects within the theory of small deformations superposed on a large deformation for plane strain of homogeneous, isotropic, incompressible materials. The problem considered is that of plane deformation of a body which in its undeformed configuration, occupies a semi-infinite strip. The long sides of the strip are free of traction while the short side is subjected to prescribed normal and shear tractions. A purely normal tensile traction is applied uniformly at the remote end. For the case of slightly nonuniform end tractions at the near end, it is shown that the resulting stress distribution differs from that of homogeneous uniaxial tension by an exponentially decaying function of the distance from the end of the strip. The decay rate is characterized explicitly in terms of the strip width, the remotely applied tensile load, and constitutive parameters. Numerical results are provided for the Mooney-Rivlin material and power-law materials which either harden or soften in tension.