Global bifurcation of anti-plane shear fronts

Abstract

We consider anti-plane shear deformations of an incompressible elastic solid whose reference configuration is an infinite cylinder with a cross section that is unbounded in one direction. For a class of generalized neo-Hookean strain energy densities and live body forces, we construct unbounded curves of front-type solutions using global bifurcation theory. Some of these curves contain solutions with deformations of arbitrarily large magnitude.