Formally, a material is said to be Cauchy-elastic if the Cauchy stress tensor σ {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\sigma }}} is a function of the strain tensor (deformation gradient) F {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {F}}} alone:
This definition assumes that the effect of temperature can be ignored, and the body is homogeneous. This is the constitutive equation for a Cauchy-elastic material.
Note that the function G {\displaystyle {\mathcal {G}}} depends on the choice of reference configuration. Typically, the reference configuration is taken as the relaxed (zero-stress) configuration, but need not be.
Material frame-indifference requires that the constitutive relation G {\displaystyle {\mathcal {G}}} should not change when the location of the observer changes. Therefore the constitutive equation for another arbitrary observer can be written σ ∗ = G ( F ∗ ) {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\sigma }}^{*}={\mathcal {G}}({\boldsymbol {F}}^{*})} . Knowing that the Cauchy stress tensor σ {\displaystyle \sigma } and the deformation gradient F {\displaystyle F} are objective quantities, one can write:
where R {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {R}}} is a proper orthogonal tensor.
The above is a condition that the constitutive law G {\displaystyle {\mathcal {G}}} has to respect to make sure that the response of the material will be independent of the observer. Similar conditions can be derived for constitutive laws relating the deformation gradient to the first or second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor.
For an isotropic material the Cauchy stress tensor σ {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\sigma }}} can be expressed as a function of the left Cauchy-Green tensor B = F ⋅ F T {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {B}}={\boldsymbol {F}}\cdot {\boldsymbol {F}}^{T}} . The constitutive equation may then be written:
In order to find the restriction on h {\displaystyle h} which will ensure the principle of material frame-indifference, one can write:
A constitutive equation that respects the above condition is said to be isotropic.
Even though the stress in a Cauchy-elastic material depends only on the state of deformation, the work done by stresses may depend on the path of deformation. Therefore a Cauchy elastic material in general has a non-conservative structure, and the stress cannot necessarily be derived from a scalar "elastic potential" function. Materials that are conservative in this sense are called hyperelastic or "Green-elastic".
R. W. Ogden, 1984, Non-linear Elastic Deformations, Dover, pp. 175–204. ↩