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Published in:
2009 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Elements of Continuum Mechanics
Authors : Prof. Dr. Ralf Greve, Prof. Dr. Heinz Blatter
Published in: Dynamics of Ice Sheets and Glaciers
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Continuum mechanics is concerned with the motion and deformation of continuous
bodies
(for instance, a glacier). A body consists of an infinite number of material elements, called
particles
. For any time
t
, each particle is identified by a position vector x (relative to a prescribed origin
O
) in the physical space
ε
, and the continuous set of position vectors for all particles of the body is called a
configuration κ
of the body. If
t
is the actual time, the corresponding configuration is called the
present configuration κ
t
. In addition, we define a
reference configuration κ
r
which refers to a fixed (or initial) time
t
0
.