A comparison of stability and bifurcation criteria for a compressible elastic cube

A version of Rivlin’s cube problem is considered for compressible materials. The cube is stretched along one axis by a fixed amount and then subjected to equal tensile loads along the other two axes. A number of general results are found. Because of the homogeneous trivial and non-trivial deformations exact bifurcation results can be found and an exact stability analysis through the second variation of the energy can be performed. This problem is then used to compare results obtained using more general methods. Firstly, results are obtained for a more general bifurcation analysis. Secondly, the exact stability results are compared with stability results obtained via a new method that is applicable to inhomogeneous problems. This new stability method allows a full nonlinear stability analysis of inhomogeneous deformations of arbitrary, compressible or incompressible, hyperelastic materials. The second variation condition expressed as an integral involving two arbitrary perturbations is replaced with an equivalent nonlinear third order system of ordinary differential equations. The positive definiteness condition is thereby reduced to the simple numerical evaluation of zeros of a well behaved function