Customer Reviews

Continuum Mechanics: Concise Theory and Problems (Dover Books on Physics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first heard about this book when in engineering graduate school. At the time, this book was out-of-print, so my version came from an almost unreadable nth xerox copy, where n is a very large number. Having had two courses in Continuum Mechanics, I was in a position to appreciate this book. In addition to defining the trace and determinant in the usual way, for example, this book also lucidly presented invariant direct notation definitions. This book contains an excellent derivation of the jump relations that must be satisfied across moving shocks. This book is too disorganized and incomplete to serve as an introductory textbook, but it is fabulous as supplemental reading if you seek new insights on topics you already know.

This "textbook" is really a bare-bones, although reasonably comprehensive, outline of an entry graduate course on continuum mechanics. Many of its 100 or so worked-out "problems" are not really problems as much they are part of larger derivations of theories. If your professor does not specify a required textbook or does not provide lecture notes, buy this book as a supplement. -UC Berkeley graduate mechanical engineering student

This book contains all the required theory in compact, though mathematically strict and complete form. About 180 pages, it is a valuable supplement for the study of continuum mechanics.

Maybe it has some use for reference, but for first time studying, this book is too concise to really explain things clearly for readers.

Besides, the notation is also not in accordance with that used by today's researchers.

Don't buy it. Buy Malvern's book instead. 'Introduction To The Mechanics Of A Continuous Medium' is the best book for studying this subject and also for future reference.

As other reviewers have said, not the choice for the first exposure to the material, but really nice reference. It has some nice cute results. Pretty weak in some areas, but it has some unique aspects as well. The direct notation is nice. My three continuum mechanics references of choice at this time would be the books by Malvern, Chadwick, and I Shih Liu, in order of sophistication, which all basically cover the same material but in quite different yet complementary ways.

I originally bought this book as a reference when I was taking my FEA graduate school course to supplement some of the concepts, namely tensors. I found the book hard to follow since it did not have detailed examples worked out; this may be suitable for more advanced graduate level courses (i.e. doctorate level).

This book can be a good supplement for a continuum mechanics text. Some parts are really good (for example the derivation of energy balance). A very good part of this book is the part in kinematics(second chapter) where he derives the transport equation in a very neat manner. This comes to good use later in the chapter on balance laws. The section on jump conditions is a good addition which is not found in many similar books. The last chapter on constitutive relations is really good. Just that chapter is worth the price.

There are two things that I did not like from this book. The first one is the author glosses over the Cauchy theorem (traction = stress tensor*normal vec.) by just giving a reference to another book. Come on!!! This is a very important component of stress analysis. He should have derived it in the book. In the later editions he puts it in the appendix and doesn't say anything about that in the main text. Poor organisation! The other one is he relies almost entirely on dyadic notation. I would have liked if he gave the equivalent forms in index notation which many people, including myself, tend to understand better.

Use this book together with Ogden's "Non-linear Elastic Deformations" and you got your self a good continuum mechanics library for less than USD 40.

It's a mathematical viewpoint for continuum mechanics derived from linear algebra. Not very practical for engineers that don't need to prove the mathematics involved.

Concise is an understatement. This book is very dense. Beyond grouping topics into chapters, there is little organizational sense. Each section is a bit of "theory" and then several worked "problems," which aren't really problems...they are more proofs and theory. Not to say that the problems aren't useful. Chadwick covers general continuum mechanics, and takes brief detours into both the solid side and the fluid side, so everyone will get something out of the book. Take note, all you engineers like me: Chadwick lets the physics fall out of the math, as opposed to using math to describe the physics, and in that regard, I find the book very cumbersome.

I think this book is best used as a supplement to a course and/or another mechanics book, or a "quick reference" kind of thing. The discussions are too brief to be of use to the initial student of mechanics. Because the apparent emphasis is on conciseness, you need to read very carefully...and flip back and forth to results in other parts of the book. The obligatory "mathematical preliminaries" section of mechanics books is here for precisely that reason- it's obligatory. It's pretty easy to see why this book is fawned over by many mechanicians...if you need to revisit some basic theory or proof as part of some other later work with modern mechanics, this is probably exactly what you're looking for.