Paper detail

On the determination of plane and axial symmetries in linear Elasticity and Piezo-electricity

We formulate necessary and sufficient conditions for a unit vector n to generate a plane or axial symmetry of a constitutive tensor. For the elasticity tensor, these conditions consist of two polynomial equations of degree lower than four in the components of n. Compared to Cowin-Mehrabadi conditions, this is an improvement, since these equations involve only the normal vector n to the plane symmetry (and no vector perpendicular to n). Similar reduced algebraic conditions are obtained for linear piezo-electricity and for totally symmetric tensors up to order 6.