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Edge Contact Forces and Quasi-Balanced Power

We consider continuous media in which contact edge forces are present. Introducing the notion of quasi-balanced contact force distribution, we are able to prove the conjectures by Noll and Virga [1] concerning the representation of contact edge forces. We generalize the Hamel-Noll theorem on the Cauchy postulate. Then we adapt the celebrated tetrahedron construction of Cauchy in order to obtain a representation theorem for stress states. In fact, we show that two stress tensors of order two and three are necessary for such a representation. Moreover we f nd the relationship between the notion of interstitial working introduced by Dunn and Serrin [2] and the notion of contact edge force.