On jets, almost symmetric tensors, and traction hyper-stresses

Abstract: The paper considers the formulation of higher-order continuum mechanics on differentiable manifolds devoid of any metric or parallelism structure. For generalized velocities modeled as sections of some vector bundle, a variational kth order hyper-stress is an object that acts on jets of generalized velocities to produce power densities. The traction hyper-stress is introduced as an object that induces hyper-traction fields on the boundaries of subbodies. Additional aspects of multilinear algebra relevant to the analysis of these objects are reviewed.