Green-Naghdi rate of the Kirchhoff stress and deformation rate: the elasticity tensor

The elasticity tensor providing the power-conjugation of the Green-Naghdi rate of the Kirchhoff stress and the deformation rate is required, e.g. by the commercially available Finite Element package ABAQUS/Standard for the material user subroutine UMAT, used to input material behaviours other than those included in the libraries of the package. This elasticity tensor had been studied in the literature, but its symmetries have only been briefly discussed, and only its component form in Cartesian coordinates was known. In this work, we derived a covariant, component-free expression of this elasticity tensor and thoroughly studied its symmetries. We found that, although symmetry on both pair of feet (indices) has been deemed to be desirable in the literature, the expression of the tensor available to-date in fact possesses only symmetry on the first pair of feet (indices), whereas the second pair lacks symmetry, and therefore carries a skew-symmetric contribution. This contribution is unnecessary, as it is automatically filtered in the contraction of the elasticity tensor with the symmetric deformation rate tensor. In order to avoid carrying this unnecessary skew-symmetric contribution in the computations, we employ a tensor identity that naturally symmetrises the second pair of feet of the elasticity tensor. We demonstrated the validity and robustness of the implementation of the user-defined material based on this tensor representation by simulating a benchmark problem consisting in biaxial tests of porcine and human atrial tissue, with material properties taken from previously performed experiments. We compared the results obtained by means of our user-defined material and those obtained through an equivalent built-in material, and obtained identical results.