Curvilinear Coordinates - Vector and Tensor Calculus in Three-dimensional Curvilinear Coordinates

Vector and Tensor Calculus in Three-dimensional Curvilinear Coordinates

Note: the Einstein summation convention of summing on repeated indices is used below.

Adjustments need to be made in the calculation of line, surface and volume integrals. For simplicity, the following restricts to three dimensions and orthogonal curvilinear coordinates. However, the same arguments apply for n-dimensional spaces. When the coordinate system is not orthogonal, there are some additional terms in the expressions.

Simmonds, in his book on tensor analysis, quotes Albert Einstein saying

The magic of this theory will hardly fail to impose itself on anybody who has truly understood it; it represents a genuine triumph of the method of absolute differential calculus, founded by Gauss, Riemann, Ricci, and Levi-Civita.

Vector and tensor calculus in general curvilinear coordinates is used in tensor analysis on four-dimensional curvilinear manifolds in general relativity, in the mechanics of curved shells, in examining the invariance properties of Maxwell's equations which has been of interest in metamaterials and in many other fields.

Some useful relations in the calculus of vectors and second-order tensors in curvilinear coordinates are given in this section. The notation and contents are primarily from Ogden, Simmonds, Green and Zerna, Basar and Weichert, and Ciarlet.

Let φ = φ(x) be a well defined scalar field and v = v(x) a well-defined vector field, and λ₁, λ₂... be parameters of the coordinates