Mechanical Behavior Modeling of Hyperelastic Transversely Isotropic Materials Based on a New Polyconvex Strain Energy Function

In this paper, the mechanical behavior of incompressible transversely isotropic materials is modeled using a strain energy density in the framework of Ball’s theory. Based on this profound theory and with respect to physical and mathematical aspects of deformation invariants, a new polyconvex constitutive model is proposed for the mechanical behavior of these materials. From the physical viewpoint, it is assumed that the proposed model is additively decomposed into three parts nominally representing the energy contributions from the matrix, fiber and fiber–matrix interaction where each of the parts should be presented in terms of the invariants consistent with the physics of the deformation. From the mathematical viewpoint, the proposed model satisfies the fundamental postulates on the form of strain energy density, specially polyconvexity and coercivity constraints. Indeed, polyconvexity ensures ellipticity condition, which in turn provides material stability and in combination with coercivity condition, guarantees the existence of the global minimizer of the total energy. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed strain energy density function, some test data of incompressible transverse materials with pure homogeneous deformations are used. It is shown that there is a good agreement between the test data and the obtained results from the proposed model. At the end, the performance of the proposed model in the prediction of the material behavior is evaluated rather than other models for two representative problems.