Plane strain bending of strain-stiffening rubber-like rectangular beams

This paper is concerned with investigation of the effects of strain-stiffening for the classical problem of plane strain bending by an end moment of a rectangular beam composed of an incompressible isotropic nonlinearly elastic material. For a variety of specific strain-energy densities that give rise to strain-stiffening in the stress–stretch response, the stresses and resultant moments are obtained explicitly. While such results are well known for classical constitutive models such as the Mooney-Rivlin and neo-Hookean models, our primary focus is on materials that undergo severe strain-stiffening in the stress–stretch response. In particular, we consider in detail two phenomenological constitutive models that reflect limiting chain extensibility at the molecular level and involve constraints on the deformation. The amount of bending that beams composed of such materials can sustain is limited by the constraint. Potential applications of the results to the biomechanics of soft tissues are indicated.