The elastic-viscoelastic correspondence principle for functionally graded materials

Paulino and Jin [Paulino, G. H., and Jin, Z.-H., 2001, "Correspondence Principle in Viscoelastic Functionally Graded Materials, " ASME J. Appl. Mech., 68, pp. 129-132], have recently shown that the viscoelastic correspondence principle remains valid for a linearly isotropic viscoelastic functionally graded material with separable relaxation (or creep) functions in space and time. This paper revisits this issue by addressing some subtle points regarding this result and examines the reasons behind the success or failure of the correspondence principle for viscoelastic functionally graded materials. For the inseparable class of nonhomogeneous materials, the correspondence principle fails be cause of an inconsistency between the replacements of the moduli and of their derivatives. A simple but informative one-dimensional example, involving an exponentially graded material, is used to further clarify these reasons.