Page 8 - Mechanics Analysis Composite Materials

PREFACE

This book is concerned with the topical problems of mechanics of advanced
composite materials whose mechanical properties are controlled by high-strength
and high-stiffness continuous fibers embedded in polymeric, metal, or ceramic
matrix. Although the idea of combining two or more components to produce
materials with controlled properties has been known and used from time
immemorial, modern composites have been developed only several decades ago
and have found by now intensive application in different fields of engineering,
particularly, in aerospace structures for which high strength-to-weightand stiffness-
to-weight ratios are required.
Due to wide existing and potential applications, composite technology has been
developed very intensively over recent decades, and there exist numerous publica-
tions that cover anisotropic elasticity, mechanics of composite materials, design,
analysis, fabrication, and application of composite structures. According to the list
of books on composites presented in Mechanics of Fibrous Composites by C.T.
Herakovich (1998) there were 35 books published in this field before 1995, and this
list should be supplemented now with at least five new books.
In connection with this, the authors were challenged with a natural question as to
what causes the necessity to publish another book and what is the differencebetween
this book and the existing ones. Concerning this question, we had at least three
motivations supporting us in this work.
First, this book is of a more specificnature than the published ones which usually
cover not only mechanics of materials but also include analysis of composite beams,
plates and shells, joints, and elements of design of composite structures that, being
also important, do not strictly belong to mechanics of composite materials. This
situation looked quite natural because composite science and technology, having
been under intensive development only over several past decades, required the books
of a universal type. Nowadays however, application of composite materials has
reached the level at which special books can be dedicated to all the aforementioned
problems of composite technology and, first of all, to mechanics of composite
materials which is discussed in this book in conjunction with analysis of composite
materials. As we hope, thus constructed combination of materials science and
mechanics of solids has allowed us to cover such specific features of material
behavior as nonlinear elasticity, plasticity, creep, structural nonlinearity and discuss
in detail the problems of material micro- and macro-mechanics that are only slightly
touched in the existing books, e.g., stress diffusion in a unidirectional material with
broken fibers, physical and statistical aspects of fiber strength, coupling effects in
anisotropic and laminated materials, etc.
Second, this book, being devoted to materials, is written by designers of
composite structures who over the last 30 years were involved in practically all main

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