ABSTRACT
Flory (1953) then Treloar (1975), and were devoted to rubber swelling. In recent literature, the theory of Flory (1953) has been improved in order to be consistent with the modern three-dimensional framework of Continuum Mechanics, and has been used for gels swelling (Hong et al. 2008, Duda et al. 2010, Chester & Anand 2010, Lucantonio et al. 2013). In most of these works, the reference configuration is chosen to be the dry configuration, mimicking what was done for rubber swelling. However, for a polymer gel, the dry state seldom exists since the gel is generally prepared in aqueous solution. Here, the derivation of the problem is modified in order to consider a reference configuration which would be already swollen. To our knowledge, only Lucantonio et al. (2013) have introduced a reference state which is initially swollen, homogeneous and stress-free, but they do not completely overcome the initial dry configuration.
