Three-Dimensional Deformations

There appears to be very little study, if any, on the extension of Stroh's formalism to three-dimensional deformations of anisotropic elastic materials. In most three-dimensional problems the analyses employ approaches that are remotely related to Stroh's two-dimensional formalism. This is not unexpected, since this has been the situation between two-dimensional and three-dimensional isotropic elasticity. However it needs not be the case for three-dimensional anisotropic elasticity. Much can be gained if a connection to the Stroh formalism can be established. Barnett and Lothe (1975a) appeared to be the only ones who made a connection between a three-dimensional solution and Stroh's two-dimensional formalism. Earlier, several investigators obtained the Green's function for the infinite anisotropic medium in term of a line integral on an oblique plane in the three-dimensional space. That line integral, as we will see here, is one of Barnett-Lothe tensors on an oblique plane. We propose in this chapter extensions and applications of Stroh's two-dimensional formalism to certain three-dimensional deformations of anisotropic elastic solids.