Universal deformations in inhomogeneous isotropic nonlinear elastic solids

Universal (controllable) deformations of an elastic solid are those deformations that can be maintained for all possible strain-energy density functions and suitable boundary tractions. Universal deformations have played a central role in nonlinear elasticity and anelasticity. However, their classification has been mostly established for homogeneous isotropic solids following the seminal works of Ericksen. In this article, we extend Ericksen’s analysis of universal deformations to inhomogeneous compressible and incompressible isotropic solids. We show that a necessary condition for the known universal deformations of homogeneous isotropic solids to be universal for inhomogeneous solids is that inhomogeneities respect the symmetries of the deformations. Symmetries of a deformation are encoded in the symmetries of its pulled-back metric (the right Cauchy–Green strain). We show that this necessary condition is sufficient as well for all the known families of universal deformations except for Family 5.