Boundary Layer Solutions in Elastic Solids

Circumferential shear deformation in an annular domain is studied for a large class of incompressible isotropic elastic materials. It is demonstrated that large strains are confined in a region adjacent to a boundary, in analogy to the boundary layer phenomenon in fluid mechanics. The size of this region is quantified. An approximate solution technique for the deformation of nonlinear elastic solids, proposed by Rajagopal [7], is further studied. In this solution, akin to the boundary layer approximation in classical fluid mechanics, the full nonlinear problem is solved in a relatively small region of large strain, while the linearized problem is solved in the remaining region. Error estimates for the approximate solution are obtained.