The elastic field outside an ellipsoidal inclusion

Abstract The results of an earlier paper are extended. The elastic field outside an inclusion or inhomogeneity is treated in greater detail. For a general inclusion the harmonic potential of a certain surface distribution may be used in place of the biharmonic potential used previously. The elastic field outside an ellipsoidal inclusion or inhomogeneity may be expressed entirely in terms of the harmonic potential of a solid ellipsoid. The solution gives incidentally the velocity field about an ellipsoid which is deforming homogeneously in a viscous fluid. An expression given previously for the strain energy of an ellipsoidal region which has undergone a shear transformation is generalized to the case where the region has elastic constants different from those of its surroundings. The Appendix outlines a general method of calculating biharmonic potentials.