On elastic solids with limiting small strain: modelling and analysis

. In order to understand nonlinear responses of materials to external stimuli of different sort, be they of mechanical, thermal, electrical, magnetic, or of optical nature, it is useful to have at one’s disposal a broad spectrum of models that have the capacity to describe in mathematical terms a wide range of material behavior. It is advantageous if such a framework stems from a simple and elegant general idea. Implicit constitutive theory of materials provides such a framework: while being built upon simple ideas, it is able to capture experimental observations with the minimum number of physical quantities involved. It also provides theoretical justification in the full three-dimensional setting for various models that were previously proposed in an ad hoc manner. From the perspective of the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, implicit constitutive theory leads to new classes of challenging mathematical problems. This study focuses on implicit constitutive models for elastic solids in general, and on its subclass consisting of elastic solids with limiting small strain. After introducing the basic concepts of implicit constitutive theory, we provide an overview of results concerning modeling within the framework of continuum mechanics. We then concentrate on the mathematical analysis of relevant boundary-value problems associated with models with limiting small strain, and we present the first analytical result concerning the existence of weak solutions in general three-dimensional domains.