text: abstract. the mechanical response, serviceability, and load bearing capacity of materials and
  structural components can be adversely affected due to external stimuli, which include exposure to
  a corrosive chemical species, high temperatures, temperature fluctuations (i.e., freezing-thawing),
  cyclic mechanical loading, just to name a few. it is, therefore, of paramount importance in several
  branches of engineering – ranging from aerospace engineering, civil engineering to biomedical engineering – to have a fundamental understanding of degradation of materials, as the materials in
  these applications are often subjected to adverse environments. as a result of recent advancements
  in material science, new materials like fiber-reinforced polymers and multi-functional materials that
  exhibit high ductility have been developed and widely used; for example, as infrastructural materials or in medical devices (e.g., stents). the traditional small-strain approaches of modeling these
  materials will not be adequate. in this paper, we study degradation of materials due to an exposure to chemical species and temperature under large-strain and large-deformations. in the first
  part of our research work, we present a consistent mathematical model with firm thermodynamic
  underpinning. we then obtain semi-analytical solutions of several canonical problems to illustrate
  the nature of the quasi-static and unsteady behaviors of degrading hyperelastic solids.