Hill’s class of compressible elastic materials and finite bending problems: Exact solutions in unified form

Hill (1978) proposed a natural extension of Hooke’s law to finite deformations. With all Seth-Hill finite strains, Hill’s natural extension presents a broad class of compressible hyperelastic materials over the whole deformation range. We show that a number of known Hookean type finite hyperelasticity models are included as particular cases in Hill’s class and that Bell’s and Ericksen’s constraints may be derived as natural consequences from Hill’s class subjected to internal constraints. Also we present a unified study of finite bending problems for elastic Hill materials. To date exact results are available for certain particular classes of compressible elastic materials, which do not cover Hill’s class. Here, with a novel idea of circumventing the strong nonlinearity we show that it is possible to derive exact solutions in unified form for the whole class of elastic Hill materials. Reduced results are also given for cases subjected to internal constraints.