THE RADIAL COMPACTION OF A HYPERELASTIC TUBE AS A BENCHMARK IN COMPRESSIBLE FINITE ELASTICITY

The stress solution to the radial compaction of a hyperelastic tube is developed analytically for both incompressible and slightly compressi ble material response. The solution is explicit for the incompressible behaviour and implicit for the compressible one. It is shown that pro per combination of tube geometry and total compaction leads to stress results very sensitive to small variations of Poisson's ratio. This ma kes the problem a good benchmark for the performance of numerical meth ods in the area of compressible finite elasticity. As an example, the commercial finite element code ABAQUS is applied to a demanding tube c onfiguration for Poisson's ratios in the range from 0.49 to 0.5. Copyr ight (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.