arXiv · 2606.17774
When Volumetric Growth Selects Surface Growth
Abstract
We investigate the relationship between volumetric and surface growth within a recently proposed optimization-driven framework for linearly elastic solids. In this approach, growth is not prescribed through an evolution law; instead, the growth distribution is determined as the solution of a constrained optimization problem. Focusing on processes driven by the minimization of the work performed by external loads in one-dimensional and axisymmetric settings, we derive explicit analytical solutions for the resulting growth distributions. Although growth is initially formulated as a volumetric process through a distributed growth strain tensor, we show that the optimal growth distributions are singular and concentrate on boundaries or internal interfaces. These results provide a variational mechanism through which, under certain conditions, surface growth is selected as the optimal realization of volumetric growth.
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Rohn Abeyaratne, Roberto Paroni, Marco Picchi Scardaoni. 2026-06-16. When Volumetric Growth Selects Surface Growth. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17774
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