A Way to Hypo-elastic Artificial Materials without a Strain Potential and Displaying Flutter Instability

Cauchy-elastic solids include hyper-elasticity and a subset of elastic materials for which the stress does not follow from a scalar strain potential. More in general, hypo-elastic materials are only defined incrementally and comprise Cauchy-elasticity. Infringement of the hyper-elastic ‘dogma’ is so far unattempted and normally believed to be impossible, as it apparently violates thermodynamics, because energy may be produced in closed strain cycles. Contrary to this belief, we show that non-hyper-elastic behavior is possible and we indicate the way to a practical realization of this new concept. In particular, a design paradigm is established for artificial materials where follower forces, so far ignored in homogenization schemes, are introduced as loads prestressing an elastic two-dimensional grid made up of linear elastic rods (reacting to elongation, flexure and shear). A rigorous application of Floquet–Bloch wave asymptotics yields an unsymmetric acoustic tensor governing the incremental dynamics of the effective material. The latter is therefore the incremental response of a hypo-elastic solid, which does not follow from a strain potential and thus does not belong to hyper-elasticity. Through the externally applied follower forces (which could be originated via interaction with a fluid, or a gas, or by application of Coulomb friction, or non-holonomic constraints), the artificial material may adsorb/release energy from/to the environment, and therefore produce energy in a closed strain loop, without violating any rule of thermodynamics. The solid is also shown to display flutter, a material instability corresponding to a Hopf bifurcation, which was advocated as possible in plastic solids, but never experimentally found and so far believed to be impossible in elasticity. The discovery of elastic materials capable of sucking up or delivering energy in closed strain cycles through interaction with the environment paves the way to realizations involving micro and nano technologies and finds definite applications in the field of energy harvesting.