Critical notes on evaluation of secant moduli and secant Poisson's ratio in solid bodies Y. Boguslavskiy' & S. Drabkhr 'Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, US Abstract In several studies, the secant Young's modulus, secant bulk modulus, secant shear modulus, and secant Poisson's ratio were used for interpretation of one-dimensional tests and then the results were applied to three-dimensional loading conditions. Presented paper shows that there is a difference between a convenient interpretation of one-dimensional tests and three dimensional tensor generalizations of eiastoplastic phenomena in solid bodies. It is shown that hydrostatic experiments cannot be used to justify the incompressibility assumption of the continuum theory of plasticity. The expressions for the secant moduli are derived when such bodies experience weak non-linear elastic deformations. The correctexpressions for the secant moduli are derived based only non-lineartheory of eiastoplastic deformations. 1 Introduction Several papers using "secant" moduli and "secant" Poisson's ratio for evaluating eiastoplastic stress-strain relations and phase transitions in solid bodies were published inrecent years.Most notable among these arethe works of Bhattacharyya and Weng [1], Li and Weng [2], Qui and Weng [3] to [5] and Weng [6]. Inthese papers several new physical characteristics of materials such as the secant Young's modulus, El, secant bulk modulus, A^, secant shear modulus, /^, and secant Poisson's ratio v'l were introduced. Theoretical papers usually begin by formulating a system of equations that explicitly define the considered problem. As such equations, the authors of the discussed papers use the following correlations: Damage & Fracture Mechanics VI, C.A. Brebbia, A.P.S. Selvadurai, (Editors) © 2000 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISBN 1-85312-812-0