# What is the recommended way to implement the symmetric fourth rank tensor of elasticity?

Let’s say, we want to solve a problem in linear elasticity with an anisotropic material:
Here, S denotes the stress, with S^{ij} = C^{ijkl}\varepsilon_{kl}, \varepsilon is the linearized Green-Lagrange strain \varepsilon(u) = \frac 1 2 \left(\nabla u + \nabla u^T\right) =: \operatorname{sym}\left(\nabla u\right), u is the displacement and C is the tensor of elasticity with rank four.
This tensor exhibits several symmetries: C^{ijkl} = C^{jikl} = C^{ijlk} = C^{klij}.

The (symmetric) bilinear form then becomes
a(u, v) = \int_\Omega \left(C\varepsilon(u)\right):\varepsilon(v)\,\mathrm d\Omega.

The question is now, how to properly implement the tensor of elasticity.
The nicest thing would be, to be able to write the following:

a = inner(dot(C, sym(nabla_grad(u))), sym(nabla_grad(v)))


Additionally, it would be nice, if FEniCS was able to determine, that this expression is symmetric.

I found some old answer here: https://fenicsproject.org/qa/10309/small-question-on-defining-constant-tensors/
The solution there is to implement a subclass of ufl.Coefficient and cpp.Constant and make it a symmetric TensorElement.
However, I found this old bug, that symmetry=True is totally broken for TensorElement: https://bitbucket.org/fenics-project/ffc/issues/78/tensorelement-symmetry-true-is-totally
The bug is quite old, but the discussion itself took more than two years and I cannot find, whether it is now fixed or not.

An alternative would be to use Voigt-Notation, as outlined in this tutorial here:
A corresponding FEniCS implementation would use as_vector to decompose the trial function into its components, multiply that vector with the matrix representation of C and afterwards use as_tensor to reinterpret the result as a tensor.