Limit point instability in pressurization of anisotropic finitely extensible hyperelastic thin-walled tube

• Non-monotony can occur during inflation of tubes with Gent׳s anisotropic material.
• Especially tubes with fibers oriented longitudinally show unstable inflation.
• Gent׳s anisotropic model can predict limit point instability even for Jm≈1.

Mechanical responses of materials undergoing large elastic deformations can exhibit a loss of stability in several ways. Such a situation can occur when a thin-walled cylinder is inflated by an internal pressure. The loss of stability is manifested by a non-monotonic relationship between the inflating pressure and internal volume of the tube. This is often called limit point instability. The results, known from the literature, show that isotropic hyperelastic materials with limiting chain extensibility property always exhibit a stable response if the extensibility parameter of the Gent model satisfies Jm<18.2. Our study investigates the same phenomenon but for tubes with anisotropic form of the Gent model (finite extensibility of fibers). Anisotropy, used in our study, increases the number of material parameters the consequence of which is to increase degree of freedom of the problem. It will be shown that, in stark contrast to isotropic material, the unstable response is predicted not only for large values of Jm but also for Jm≈1 and smaller, and that the existence of limit point instability significantly depends on the orientation of preferred directions and on the ratio of linear parameters in the strain energy density function (this ratio can be interpreted as the ratio of weights by which fibers and matrix contribute to the strain energy density). Especially tubes reinforced with fibers oriented closely to the longitudinal direction are susceptible to a loss of monotony during pressurization.