Linear elastic materials are characterized by an elastic potential of which only the quadratic terms in the strain are kept. It can be defined in a isotropic, orthotropic or fully anisotropic version. Isotropic linear elastic materials are characterized by their Young's modulus and Poisson's coefficient. Common steels are usually isotropic. Orthotropic materials, such as wood or cubic single crystals are characterized by 9 nonzero constants and fully anisotropic materials by 21 constants. For elastic materials the keyword *ELASTIC is used.
A special case of a linear elastic isotropic material is an ideal gas for small
pressure deviations. From the ideal gas equation one finds that the pressure
deviation is related to a density change
by
![]() |
(47) |
where is the density at rest,
is the specific gas constant and
is the temperature in Kelvin. From this one can derive the equations
![]() |
(48) |
and
![]() |
(49) |
where
denotes the stress and
the linear strain. This means that an ideal gas can be modeled as an isotropic elastic material with
Lamé constants
and
. This corresponds to a
Young's modulus
and a Poisson coefficient
. Since the latter
values lead to numerical difficulties it is advantageous to define the ideal
gas as an orthotropic material with
and
.