Customer Reviews

Formulas for Stress, Strain, and Structural Matrices

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

 

 

This is a first-class reference book, very well organized. As a practising structural engineer, I'm commonly confronted with strength of materials formulas for different kind of structural members and I do extensive FE modeling. It is interesting to have analytical formulas to check these calculations on some occasions.

Roark's formulas for stress and strain hadn't satisfied me: information is not oriented for structural engineers, introductory texts are not enough theoretical and you have US units throughout.

In Pilkey's book, you have the perfect structural engineer's reference: many chapters, with at first a list of notation, explanation of conventions, and then a short introductory course on the subject together with solved examples. After that, there it is: magnificent well-organized "tables", with all kind of data of prime interest to a structural engineer. As an example, I'll mention that you can find plastic section modulus for about 11 section types.

Units are mixed for examples, but for data you have always both US and SI units furnished.

For all entries, Pilkey's book is far more complete than the Roark's one. You'll be surprised by the vastness and depth of formulas furnished. Furthermore, you have structural matrices in each case if you want to do numerical programming.

The list of references is up to date and very extensive. It is a pricy book, but you'll not regret it!

This is the most complete compilation of formulas for structural engineering as far as I can tell, (the plates and shells sections are outstanding). However, I would not advise anyone to use this book alone, even for short calculations of simple elements I always look for a second and sometimes a third source of reference to confirm results. Even the best of books have typos, especially in regards to equations.

For some years now I have worked as a project manager, I don't have as much time to do as many structural calculations as I would like to any more. However in occasions I need to verify the results of other engineers or assess existing structures for a preliminary design. This book has up to now not let me down once in any of these calculations. I would definitely recommend it to any engineer versed in structural analysis.

Best regards,

Bryan

I can't say enough about this book. However, you may hate this book just based on the fact that you'll end up throwing away a handful of your ol tried n trusty references after getting it. It is that comprehensive. I haven't opened my Roark's since I got it. Roark does a good job of providing info that's useful to mechanical and structural engineers, but this was obviously conceived from the get-go with structural engineering in mind (though its written by a mechanical engring professor).

I have no qualms stating that this is THE new reference text for non-material (steel, concrete, etc) structural engineering. Need a generic stiffness matrix for a tapered beam with spring supports? Got it. How about plates on elastic foundations, or do you need 100 pages of tabulated internal forces, deflections and dynamic properties of thin-shells of revolution? Got it.

You won't regret shelling out the cash for this one...

This is a great book. It has helped me write more lab reports than I even want to count ...

It's very good guide for my job