Page 10 - Aircraft Stuctures for Engineering Student

Preface

During my experience of teaching aircraft structures I have felt the need for a text-
book written specifically for students of aeronautical engineering. Although there
have been a number of excellent books written on the subject they are now either
out of date or too specialist in content to fulfil the requirements of an undergraduate
textbook. My aim, therefore, has been to fill this gap and provide a completely self-
contained course in aircraft structures which contains not only the fundamentals of
elasticity and aircraft structural analysis but also the associated topics of airworthi-
ness and aeroelasticity.
The book is intended for students studying for degrees, Higher National Diplomas
and Higher National Certificates in aeronautical engineering and will be found of
value to those students in related courses who specialize in structures. The subject
matter has been chosen to provide the student with a textbook which will take him
from the beginning of the second year of his course, when specialization usually
begins, up to and including his final examination. I have arranged the topics so
that they may be studied to an appropriate level in, say, the second year and then
resumed at a more advanced stage in the final year; for example, the instability of
columns and beams may be studied as examples of structural instability at second
year level while the instability of plates and stiffened panels could be studied in the
final year. In addition, I have grouped some subjects under unifying headings to
emphasize their interrelationship; thus, bending, shear and torsion of open and
closed tubes are treated in a single chapter to underline the fact that they are just
different loading cases of basic structural components rather than isolated topics. I
realize however that the modern trend is to present methods of analysis in general
terms and then consider specific applications. Nevertheless, I feel that in cases
such as those described above it is beneficial for the student’s understanding of the
subject to see the close relationships and similarities amongst the different portions
of theory.
Part I of the book, ‘Fundamentals of Elasticity’, Chapters 1-6, includes sufficient
elasticity theory to provide the student with the basic tools of structural analysis.
The work is standard but the presentation in some instances is original. In Chapter
4 I have endeavoured to clarify the use of energy methods of analysis and present a
consistent, but general, approach to the various types of structural problem for
which energy methods are employed. Thus, although a variety of methods are dis-
cussed, emphasis is placed on the methods of complementary and potential energy.