Soliton-like solutions based on geometrically nonlinear Cosserat micropolar elasticity

•We study Cosserat micropolar elasticity.•(Micro-)rotations are allowed to be large.•Wave-like solutions are considered.•We are able to find soliton-like solutions.

The Cosserat model generalises an elastic material taking into account the possible microstructure of the elements of the material continuum. In particular, within the Cosserat model the structured material point is rigid and can only experience microrotations, which is also known as micropolar elasticity. We present the geometrically nonlinear theory taking into account all possible interaction terms between the elastic and microelastic structures. This is achieved by considering the irreducible pieces of the deformation gradient and of the dislocation curvature tensor. In addition we also consider the so-called Cosserat coupling term. In this setting we seek soliton type solutions assuming small elastic displacements, however, we allow the material points to experience full rotations which are not assumed to be small. By choosing a particular ansatz we are able to reduce the system of equations to a sine–Gordon type equation which is known to have soliton solutions.