Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
Recently there has been much interest in theories describing the behaviour of a mixture of two or more continua, which are allowed to diffuse through each other and which interact mechanically and thermally. In the present note we consider such a mixture consisting of two isotropic incompressible non-linear elastic solids; physically this may describe a composite of two rubber-like materials. Such a mixture possesses internal friction between the constituents when deformed (called diffusive resistance or diffusive force), which acts as a damping mechanism. This damping mechanism has a static part and a dynamic part, and we here show that the exact static solutions which exist for an isotropic incompressible non-linear elastic solid are such that the damping mechanism is expressible as a gradient, and hence are also controllable for such a mixture. We also discuss the corresponding dynamic solutions.
From a practical viewpoint, some experiments carried out on vulcanized synthetic rubber-like materials may involve a mixture rather than a pure solid.