Comment on “Surface elastic constants of a soft solid” by Q. Xu, R. W. Style and E. R. Dufresne, Soft Matter, 2018, 14, 916

Abstract

The commented article represents one of the attempts to use the Shuttleworth equation for predicting surface stresses in a soft material. However, this led to the definition of surface stress in terms of the total surface energy instead of the density of this energy. This contradicts the theory of elasticity and is the result of mathematical defects made in the derivation of the above equation.