Continuum mechanics of moving defects in growing bodies

Abstract

Growth processes in many living organisms create thin, soft materials with an intrinsically hyperbolic geometry. These objects support novel types of mesoscopic defects - discontinuity lines for the second derivative and branch points - terminating defects for these line discontinuities. These higher-order defects move "easily", and thus confer a great degree of flexibility to thin hyperbolic elastic sheets. We develop a general, higher-order, continuum mechanical framework from which we can derive the dynamics of higher order defects in a thermodynamically consistent manner. We illustrate our framework by obtaining the explicit equations for the dynamics of branch points in an elastic body.