By Peter Howell, Gregory Kozyreff, John Ockendon

Online ISBN: 9780511611605 Hardback ISBN: 9780521854894 Paperback ISBN: 9780521671095 Book DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511611605 Cambridge University Press

Although solid mechanics is a vitally important branch of applied mechanics, it is often less popular, at least among students, than its close relative, fluid mechanics. Several reasons can be advanced for this disparity, such as the prevalence of tensors in models for solids or the especial difficulty of handling nonlinearity. Perhaps the most daunting prospect for the student is the multitude of different behaviours that can occur and cause elementary theories of elasticity to become irrelevant in practice. Examples include fracture, buckling and plasticity, and these pose intellectual challenges in solid mechanics that are every bit as fascinating as concepts like flight, shock waves and turbulence in fluid dynamics. Our principal objective in this book is to demonstrate this fact to undergraduate and beginning graduate students.