Do we need Truesdell's empirical inequalities? On the coaxiality of stress and stretch

Abstract

Truesdell's empirical inequalities are considered essential in various fields of nonlinear elasticity. However, they are often used merely as a sufficient criterion for semi-invertibility of the isotropic stress strain-relation, even though weaker and much less restricting constitutive requirements like the strict Baker-Ericksen inequalities are available for this purpose. We elaborate the relations between such constitutive conditions, including a weakened version of the empirical inequalities, and their connection to bi-coaxiality and related matrix properties. In particular, we discuss a number of issues arising from the seemingly ubiquitous use of the phrase "$X,Y$ have the same eigenvectors" when referring to commuting symmetric tensors $X,Y$.