17: Appendix F- The Cauchy Stress Tensor
( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)
In section 6.3.2 we defined the Cauchy array, whose elements are the components of the stress vector →f acting on each of the three coordinate planes:
τij=f(i)j.
In this appendix we will demonstrate three additional properties of this array:
- The stress vector acting on any plane is given by fj=τijni, where ˆn is the unit normal to the plane in question.
- The array τ∼ transforms as a 2nd-order tensor.
- τ∼ is symmetric.
We will do this by applying Newton’s second law to carefully chosen fluid parcels and imagining the result if we take the size of the parcel to zero.