Reformation Instability in Elastic Solids

The reformation of a body fundamentally involves the mapping of one natural reference configuration of it into another natural reference configuration. The mass and the constitutive properties of the material remain unaltered, but the overall shape of the reference configuration generally changes. If, when a natural reference configuration is distorted, there is a portion of the boundary of the body that is displacement controlled, then a reformation of the body must be such that the original displacement controlled part of the boundary and its reformation are identical. In common applications that involve reformation, the remainder of the boundary is traction-free and a reformation essentially involves a change of the morphology of this traction-free surface. For example, undulations are often a characteristic feature of the reformation of a free, plane boundary surface. Reformations are a result of a material instability and they may associate with a chemically induced diffusive processes in which particles of the body move into preferred places. Fundamentally, a reformation is generated in response to the drive to lower the total stored energy of the body. In this work we are not concerned with the physical processes that take place during reformation, but rather we are concerned with characterizing the onset of the instability. We develop a variational characterization of the reformation instability for a nonlinear elastic body and we include the effect of surface energy. As an example, we consider the axial deformation of a circular cylinder and argue that small scale nano-wires, for which the diameter-to-length ratio is sufficiently small, are expected to be stable with respect to spatial variations when extended. Moreover, we observe that if the surfacial energy function is sufficiently convex at the undistorted state such wires may also be stable with respect to spatial variations when compressed. We then show that such small scale nano-wires are unstable with respect to reformation when either extended or compressed.