This volume contains the papers presented at the IUT AM Symposium of "Mesoscopic Dynamics of Fracture Process and Materials Strength", held in July 2003, at the Hotel Osaka Sun Palace, Osaka, Japan. The Symposium was proposed in 2001, aiming at organizing concentrated discussions on current understanding of fracture process and inhomogeneous deformation governing the materials strength with emphasis on the mesoscopic dynamics associated with evolutional mechanical behaviour under micro/macro mutual interaction. The decision of the General Assembly of International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUT AM) to accept our proposal was well-timed and attracted attention. Driven by the development of new theoretical and computational techniques, various novel challenges to investigate the mesoscopic dynamics have been actively done recently, including large-scaled 3D atomistic simulations, discrete dislocation dynamics and other micro/mesoscopic computational analyses. The Symposium attracted sixty-six participants from eight countries, and forty two papers were presented. The presentations comprised a wide variety of fundamental subjects of physics, mechanical models, computational strategies as well as engineering applications. Among the subjects, discussed are (a) dislocation patterning, (b) crystal plasticity, (c) characteristic fracture of amorphous/nanocrystal, (d) nano-indentation, (e) ductile-brittle transition, (f) ab-initio calculation, (g) computational methodology for multi-scale analysis and others.

What can be added to the fracture mechanics of metal fatigue that has not already been said since the 1900s? From the view point of the material and structure engineer, there are many aspects of failure by fatigue that are in need of attention, particularly when the size and time of the working components are changed by orders of magnitude from those considered by st traditional means. The 21 century marks an era of technology transition where structures are made larger and devices are made smaller, rendering the method of destructive testing unpractical. While health monitoring entered the field of science and engineering, the practitioners are discovering that the correlation between the signal and the location of interest depends on a priori knowledge of where failure may initiate. This information is not easy to find because the integrity of the physical system will change with time. Required is software that can self-adjust in time according to the monitored data. In this connection, effective application of health monitoring can use a predictive model of fatigue crack growth. Earlier fatigue crack growth models assumed functional dependence on the maximum stress and the size of the pre-existing crack or defect. Various possibilities were examined in the hope that the data could be grouped such that linear interpolation would apply.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the theory and applications of the mechanics of transversely isotropic elastic materials. There are many reasons why it should be written. First, the theory of transversely isotropic elastic materials is an important branch of applied mathematics and engineering science; but because of the difficulties caused by anisotropy, the mathematical treatments and descriptions of individual problems have been scattered throughout the technical literature. This often hinders further development and applications. Hence, a text that can present the theory and solution methodology uniformly is necessary. Secondly, with the rapid development of modern technologies, the theory of transversely isotropic elasticity has become increasingly important. In addition to the fields with which the theory has traditionally been associated, such as civil engineering and materials engineering, many emerging technologies have demanded the development of transversely isotropic elasticity. Some immediate examples are thin film technology, piezoelectric technology, functionally gradient materials technology and those involving transversely isotropic and layered microstructures, such as multi-layer systems and tribology mechanics of magnetic recording devices. Thus a unified mathematical treatment and presentation of solution methods for a wide range of mechanics models are of primary importance to both technological and economic progress.

The essential aim of this book is to consider a wide set of problems arising in the mathematical modeling of mechanical systems under unilateral constraints. In these investigations elastic and non-elastic deformations, friction and adhesion phenomena are taken into account. All the necessary mathematical tools are given: local boundary value problem formulations, construction of variational equations and inequalities and their transition to minimization problems, existence and uniqueness theorems, and variational transformations (Friedrichs and Young-Fenchel-Moreau) to dual and saddle-point search problems.

This book is written by leading experts with both profound knowledge and rich practical experience in advanced mechanics and the microelectronics industry essential for current and future development. It aims to provide the cutting edge knowledge and solutions for various mechanical related problems, in a systematic way. It contains important and detailed information about the state-of-the-art theories, methodologies, the way of working and real case studies.

This book deals with various computational procedures for multiple repeated analyses (reanalysis) of structures, and presents them in a unified approach. It meets the need for a general text covering the basic concepts and methods as well as recent developments in this area. To clarify the presentation, many illustrative examples and numerical results are demonstrated. Previous books on structural analysis do not cover most of the material presented here.

Parallel robots are closed-loop mechanisms presenting very good performances in terms of accuracy, velocity, rigidity and ability to manipulate large loads. They have been used in a large number of applications ranging from astronomy to flight simulators and are becoming increasingly popular in the field of machine-tool industry. This book presents a complete synthesis of the latest results on the possible mechanical architectures, analysis and synthesis of this type of mechanism. It is intended to be used by students (with over 150 exercises and numerous internet addresses), researchers (with over 650 references and anonymous ftp access to the code of some algorithms presented in this book) and engineers (for which practical results, mistakes to avoid, and applications are presented). Since the publication of the first edition (2000) there has been an impressive increase in terms of study and use of this kind of structure that are reported in this book. This second edition has been completely overhauled. The initial chapter on kinematics has been split into Inverse Kinematics and Direct Kinematics. A new chapter on calibration was added. The other chapters have also been rewritten to a large extent. The reference section has been updated to include around 45% new works that appeared after the first edition.

This book synthesizes the results of the seventh in a successful series of workshops that were established by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Technische Universität Berlin, bringing together researchers from both universities in order to present research results to an international community. Aspects covered here include, among others, Models and specification; Simulation of different properties; Middleware for distributed real-time systems; Signal Analysis; Control methods; Applications in airborne and medical systems.

Annotation This is the first monograph devoted to the foundation of the theory of composite anisotropic thin-walled beams and to its applications in various problems involving the aeronautical/aerospace, helicopter, naval and mechanical structures. Throughout the theoretical part, an effort was made to provide the treatment of the subject by using the equations of the 3-D elasticity theory. Non-classical effects such as transverse shear, warping constraint, anisotropy of constituent materials yielding the coupling of twist-bending (lateral), bending (transversal)-extension have been included and their implications have been thoroughly analyzed. Thermal effects have been included and in order to be able to circumvent their deleterious effects, functionally graded materials have been considered in their construction. Implications of the application of the tailoring technique and of the active feedback control on free vibration, dynamic response, instability and aeroelasticity of such structures have been amply investigated. Special care was exercised throughout this work to address and validate the adopted solution methodologies and the obtained results against those available in the literature and obtained via numerical or experimental means.

This book is the first to deal with the important topic of the fire behaviour of fibre reinforced polymer composite materials. The book covers all of the key issues on the behaviour of composites in a fire. Also covered are fire protection materials for composites, fire properties of nanocomposites, fire safety regulations and standards, fire test methods, and health hazards from burning composites.