COUPLE-STRESSES AND SINGULAR STRESS CONCENTRATIONS IN ELASTIC SOLIDS.

Continuum-mechanical theories of the type initiated in rudimentary form by the Cosserats [1], which admit in addition to ordinary stresses the presence of couple-stresses, have—for several and diverse reasons—attracted a renewed and growing interest during recent years. A particularly comprehensive study of the linearized Cosserat theory with constrained rotations for elastic solids was published by Mindlin and Tiersten [2]2 in 1962. Since that time various related broader generalizations of conventional elasticity theory have been proposed in investigations that introduce, beyond ordinary and couple-stresses, hyper-stresses of ever increasing complexity and physical elusiveness.