"Arthur Boresi and Ken Chong's Elasticity in Engineering Mechanics has been prized by many aspiring and practicing engineers as an easy-to-navigate guide to an area of engineering science that is fundamental to aeronautical, civil, and mechanical engineering, and to other branches of engineering. With its focus not only on elasticity theory but also on concrete applications in real engineering situations, this work is a core text in a spectrum of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and a superior reference for engineering professionals."--BOOK JACKET.

The classical theory of elasticity maintains a place of honour in the science ofthe behaviour ofsolids. Its basic definitions are general for all branches of this science, whilst the methods forstating and solving these problems serve as examples of its application. The theories of plasticity, creep, viscoelas ticity, and failure of solids do not adequately encompass the significance of the methods of the theory of elasticity for substantiating approaches for the calculation of stresses in structures and machines. These approaches constitute essential contributions in the sciences of material resistance and structural mechanics. The first two chapters form Part I of this book and are devoted to the basic definitions ofcontinuum mechanics; namely stress tensors (Chapter 1) and strain tensors (Chapter 2). The necessity to distinguish between initial and actual states in the nonlinear theory does not allow one to be content with considering a single strain measure. For this reason, it is expedient to introduce more rigorous tensors to describe the stress-strain state. These are considered in Section 1.3 for which the study of Sections 2.3-2.5 should precede. The mastering of the content of these sections can be postponed until the nonlinear theory is studied in Chapters 8 and 9.

This is an intermediate book for beginning postgraduate students and junior researchers, and offers up-to-date content on both continuum mechanics and elasticity. The material is self-contained and should provide readers sufficient working knowledge in both areas. Though the focus is primarily on vector and tensor calculus (the so-called coordinate-free approach), the more traditional index notation is used whenever it is deemed more sensible. With the increasing demand for continuum modeling in such diverse areas as mathematical biology and geology, it is imperative to have various approaches to continuum mechanics and elasticity. This book presents these subjects from an applied mathematics perspective. In particular, it extensively uses linear algebra and vector calculus to develop the fundamentals of both subjects in a way that requires minimal use of coordinates (so that beginning graduate students and junior researchers come to appreciate the power of the tensor notation).

This book is intended to be an introduction to elasticity theory. It is as sumed that the student, before reading this book, has had courses in me chanics (statics, dynamics) and strength of materials (mechanics of mate rials). It is written at a level for undergraduate and beginning graduate engineering students in mechanical, civil, or aerospace engineering. As a background in mathematics, readers are expected to have had courses in ad vanced calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. Our experience in teaching elasticity theory to engineering students leads us to believe that the course must be problem-solving oriented. We believe that formulation and solution of the problems is at the heart of elasticity theory. 1 Of course orientation to problem-solving philosophy does not exclude the need to study fundamentals. By fundamentals we mean both mechanical concepts such as stress, deformation and strain, compatibility conditions, constitu tive relations, energy of deformation, and mathematical methods, such as partial differential equations, complex variable and variational methods, and numerical techniques. We are aware of many excellent books on elasticity, some of which are listed in the References. If we are to state what differentiates our book from other similar texts we could, besides the already stated problem-solving ori entation, list the following: study of deformations that are not necessarily small, selection of problems that we treat, and the use of Cartesian tensors only.

Since the first edition of this book was published, there have been major improve- TM TM ments in symbolic mathematical languages such as Maple and Mathematica and this has opened up the possibility of solving considerably more complex and hence interesting and realistic elasticity problems as classroomexamples. It also enables the student to focus on the formulation of the problem (e. g. the appropriate governing equations and boundary conditions) rather than on the algebraic manipulations, with a consequent improvement in insight into the subject and in motivation. During the past 10 years I have developed files in Maple and Mathematica to facilitate this p- cess, notably electronic versions of the Tables in the present Chapters 19 and 20 and of the recurrence relations for generating spherical harmonics. One purpose of this new edition is to make this electronic material available to the reader through the Kluwer website www. elasticity. org. I hope that readers will make use of this resource and report back to me any aspects of the electronic material that could benefit from improvement or extension. Some hints about the use of this material are contained in Appendix A. Those who have never used Maple or Mathematica will find that it takes only a few hours of trial and error to learn how to write programs to solve boundary value problems in elasticity.