Review of the notes growth main (070).

 

Motivation

There are at least two models in continuum mechanics where mass balance is violated, that is,

The first example of such violation is the artificial compressibility approximation of the Navier-Stokes equation, where the mass density is assumed constant but the divergence of the velocity field does not vanish, i.e. , . A second example is provided by theories of growth, where is replaced by

where is the mass supply. In both cases, the characterization of inertia is problematic.

Indeed, if we take the view that the evolution equations of continuum mechanics arise by writing the force balance equation with the generalized body force , where

is the inertial body force, then balance of energy is twisted. In fact, given a time-dependent spatial region which is being transported by the velocity field, the time derivative of the kinetic energy contained in is, according to Reynolds' theorem,

Important remark

In some sense, a fluid described through the artificial compressibility method may be interpreted as an incompressible fluid ( is constant) with external mass supply .

Growing materials

Prompted by these considerations, the note considers a growing body, where the growth rate

namely, the ratio between mass supply and mass density, is regarded as an extra kinematic descriptor. The internal and external power expenditures associated to this descriptor are , and , where is the virtual accretion rate. This leads to the balance equation

which complements the standard force balance. The dissipation inequality takes the form:

where is understood as chemical potential. In its local form, the inequality reads:

where the constitutive equations for the deviatoric part of the stress are given by the requirement that:

The main idea is to retain as the constitutive equation for the inertial force, and to assume that the external microforce splits as , where

where is a coefficient. The motivation for this assumption is that if we take the kinetic energy

and we compute the derivative of the first term then we have, under the condition ,

and, under the condition ,

The key idea is then to prescribe the constitutive equations for the inertia force and microforce in such a way that their power expenditures coincides with minus the time derivative of the kinetic energy specified in , taking separately and equal to null. Clearly, without the splitting assumption, the time derivative of the kinetic energy would contain an extra coupling term:

This coupling term may be either attached to the inertial microforce, thus replacing with , or it could be attached to , thus giving $\boldsymbol\iota=

For a viscous fluid the evolution equations are:

The pressure is related to the free energy by the equation

Note that in the absence of diffusion the microforce balance law yields the chemical potential if the mass supply is assigned. Otherwise, if we assign then the same equation provides the growth rate and hence the mass supply .

These equations are studied in the case of a isotropic affine motion. In this case the main unknown is the dilatation . The evolution equations are:

where

the constitutive equation for the Cauchy stress follows from the choice of the free energy:

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