In this volume a survey of the most relevant nonlinear crack models is provided, with the purpose of analyzing the nonlinear mechanical effects occurring at the tip of macrocracks in quasi-brittle materials - such as concrete, rocks, ceramics, polymers, high-strength metallic alloys - and in brittle-matrix fibre-reinforced composites. Such local effects, as, for example, plastic deformation, yielding, strain-hardening, strain-softening, mechanical damage, matrix microcracking, aggregate debonding, fibre bridging, fibre slippage, crazing, and so on, are properly described through different simplified models, representing the peculiarities of the phenomena involved. The models are introduced and described separately and then compared in the last part of the book. This volume will be of interest to students, professionals and researchers in the field of nonlinear fracture mechanics.

This timely text is the first monograph to develop self-consistent methods and apply these to the solution of problems of electromagnetic and elastic wave propagation in matrix composites and polycrystals. Predictions are compared with experimental data and exact solutions. Explicit equations and efficient numerical algorithms for calculating the velocities and attenuation coefficients of the mean (coherent) wave fields propagating in composites and polycrystals are presented.

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 started its life as a series of lectures given by the second author from the 1970’s onwards to students in their third and fourth years in the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics at Rostov State University. For these lectures there was also an audience of engineers and applied mechanicists who wished to understand the functional analysis used in contemporary research in their fields. These people were not so much interested in functional analysis itself as in its applications; they did not want to be told about functional analysis in its most abstract form, but wanted a guided tour through those parts of the analysis needed for their applications. The lecture notes evolved over the years as the first author started to make more formal typewritten versions incorporating new material. About 1990 the first author prepared an English version and submitted it to Kluwer Academic Publishers for inclusion in the series Solid Mechanics and its Applications. At that state the notes were divided into three long chapters covering linear and nonlinear analysis. As Series Editor, the third author started to edit them. The requirements of lecture notes and books are vastly different. A book has to be complete (in some sense), self contained, and able to be read without the help of an instructor.

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.

Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium held in Cracow, Poland, 24-27 September 2002

Integrating macroscopic properties with observations at lower levels, this book details advances in multiscale modelling and analysis pertaining to classes of composites which either have a wider range of relevant microstructural scales, such as metals, or do not have a very well-defined microstructure, e.g. cementitious or ceramic composites. The IUTAM symposia proceedings provide a platform for extensive further discussion and research.

This is the first book of robotics presenting solutions of uncoupled and fully-isotropic parallel robotic manipulators and a method for their structural synthesis. Part 1 presents the methodology proposed for structural synthesis. Part 2 presents the various topologies of parallel robots generated by this systematic approach. Many solutions are presented here for the first time. The book will contribute to a widespread implementation of these solutions in industrial products.

by the author to the English edition The book aims to present a powerful new tool of computational mechanics, complex variable boundary integral equations (CV-BIE). The book is conceived as a continuation of the classical monograph by N. I. Muskhelishvili into the computer era. Two years have passed since the Russian edition of the present book. We have seen growing interest in numerical simulation of media with internal structure, and have evidence of the potential of the new methods. The evidence was especially clear in problems relating to multiple grains, blocks, cracks, inclusions and voids. This prompted me, when preparing the English edition, to place more emphasis on such topics. The other change was inspired by Professor Graham Gladwell. It was he who urged me to abridge the chain of formulae and to increase the number of examples. Now the reader will find more examples showing the potential and advantages of the analysis. The first chapter of the book contains a simple exposition of the theory of real variable potentials, including the hypersingular potential and the hypersingular equations. This makes up for the absence of such exposition in current textbooks, and reveals important links between the real variable BIE and the complex variable counterparts. The chapter may also help readers who are learning or lecturing on the boundary element method.

The aim of this book is to present the mathematical theory and the know-how to make computer programs for the numerical approximation of Optimal Control of PDE's. The computer programs are presented in a straightforward generic language. As a consequence they are well structured, clearly explained and can be translated easily into any high level programming language. Applications and corresponding numerical tests are also given and discussed. To our knowledge, this is the first book to put together mathematics and computer programs for Optimal Control in order to bridge the gap between mathematical abstract algorithms and concrete numerical ones. The text is addressed to students and graduates in Mathematics, Mechanics, Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, Information Technology and Engineering. It can also be used for Master and Ph.D. programs.