An Approach to Growth Mechanics Based on the Analytical Mechanics of Nonholonomic Systems

Abstract

Motivated by the convenience, in some biomechanical problems, of interpreting the mass balance law of a growing medium as a nonholonomic constraint on the time rate of a structural descriptor known as growth tensor, we employ some results of analytical mechanics to show that such constraint can be studied variationally. Our purpose is to move a step forward in the formulation of a field theory of the mechanics of volumetric growth by defining a Lagrangian function that incorporates the nonholonomic constraint of the mass balance. The knowledge of such Lagrangian function permits, on the one hand, to deduce the dynamic equations of a growing medium as the result of a variational procedure known as Hamilton–Suslov Principle (clearly, up to non-potential generalized forces that are accounted for by extending this procedure), and, on the other hand, to study the symmetries and conservation laws that pertain to a given growth problem. While this second issue is not investigated in this work, we focus on the first one, and we show that the Euler–Lagrange equations of the considered growing medium, which describe both its motion and the evolution of the growth tensor, can be obtained by reformulating a variational method developed by other authors. We discuss the main features of this method in the context of growth mechanics, and we show how our procedure is able to improve them.