We are going to consider the forces exerted on a material. These can be external or internal. External forces come in two flavors: body forces(given per unit mass or volume) and surface forces(given per unit area). If we cut a body of material in equilibrium under a set of external forces along a plane as shown in fig. 1. and consider one side of it we draw two conclusions: 1 the equilibrium provided by the loads from the side taken out is provided by a set of forces that are distributed among the material particles adjacent to
which generalizes to the statement. This reduces the number of material constants from 81 to 54. In a similar fashion we can make use of the symmetry of the strain tensor This further reduces the number of material constants to 36. To further reduce the number of material constants consider the conclusion from the first law for elastic materials, equation