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Hyperelastic and hyperfoam materials

Hyperelastic materials are materials for which a potential function exists such that the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor can be written as the derivative of this potential with respect to the Lagrangian strain tensor. This definition includes linear elastic materials, although the term hyperelastic material is usually reserved for proper nonlinear elastic materials. One important class constitutes the isotropic hyperelastic materials, for which the potential function is a function of the strain invariants only. All rubber material models presently included in CalculiX are of that type (Arruda-Boyce, Mooney-Rivlin, Neo Hooke, Ogden, Polynomial, Reduced Polynomial and Yeoh). They are selected by the keyword *HYPERELASTIC. Rubber materials are virtually incompressible (virtually no dependence on the third Lagrangian strain invariant which takes values close to 1). The dependence on the third invariant (the compressibility) is separated from the dependence on the first two invariants and is governed by so called compressibility coefficients, taking the value 0 for perfectly incompressible materials. Perfectly incompressible materials require the use of hybrid finite elements, in which the pressure is taken as an additional independent variable (in addition to the displacements). CalculiX does not provide such elements. Consequently, a slight amount of compressibility is required for CalculiX to work. If the user inserts zero compressibility coefficients, CalculiX uses a default value corresponding to an initial value of the Poisson coefficient of 0.475.

Another example of isotropic hyperelastic materials are the hyperfoam materials, which are also implemented in CalculiX (activated by the keyword *HYPERFOAM). Hyperfoam materials are very compressible.

Other materials frequently simulated by a hyperelastic model are human tissue (lung tissue, heart tissue..). To simulate these classes of materials anisotropic hyperelastic models are used, in which the potential function depends on the Lagrangian strain tensor components. No such models are implemented in CalculiX, although their inclusion is not difficult to manage. For further information the reader is referred to [5]. A very nice treatment of the large deformation theory for hyperelastic materials is given in [23].

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