Abstract
We investigated free-vibration acoustic resonance (FVAR) of two-dimensional St Venant-Kirchhoff-type hyperelastic materials and revealed the existence and structure of colour symmetry embedded therein. The hyperelastic material is isotropic and frame indifferent and includes geometrical nonlinearity in its constitutive equation. The FVAR state is formulated using the principle of stationary action with a subsidiary condition. Numerical analysis based on the Ritz method revealed the existence of four types of nonlinear FVAR modes associated with the irreducible representations of a linearized system. Projection operation revealed that the FVAR modes can be classified on the basis of a single colour (black or white) and three types of bicolour (black and white) magnetic point groups: [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. These results demonstrate that colour symmetry naturally arises in the finite amplitude nonlinear FVAR modes, and its vibrational symmetries are explained in terms of magnetic point groups rather than the irreducible representations that have been used for linearized systems. We also predicted a grey colour nonlinear FVAR mode which cannot be derived from a linearized system.