Structural Synthesis in Precision Elasticity reflects the summary of theoretical and experimental studies whose conclusions are effective for optimized structural synthesis in precision elasticity, as well as demonstrate a large experience and options in the synthesis, production, application of precision elastic guides, mechanisms, correctors, transducers, instruments and machines. The main focus of this book is in the possible simplification of the corresponding analytical apparatus by using kinematical equivalents, matrix methods, appropriate contours, and function expansion with enough accurate minimal polynomials. This approach allows for substitution of some known unwieldy formulae and methods that are not convenient for digestible and tractable synthesis. The book consists of two main parts: the elastic systems functional analysis and structural synthesis methods, including effective approximations and references to the history of their development; and, the application and development of prevision functional elastic systems at reference and operating conditions, including the observation of archives with effective synthesized structures. recommendations. This book gives theoretical and practical tools to researchers, precision machines, instruments and miniature systems designers, engineers, metrologists, and engineering students. Despite that this book is dedicated to the general problems of the structural synthesis in precision elasticity, most of the practical examples and applications are concerned with the measuring systems as the precision is their main goal.The author intends to show close connection between the elastic precision structures developed during the 20th century, and even before and the new elastic systems for atomic for microscopy and other recently created advanced structures in precision elasticity.

On Fracture Mechanics A major objective of engineering design is the determination of the geometry and dimensions of machine or structural elements and the selection of material in such a way that the elements perform their operating function in an efficient, safe and economic manner. For this reason the results of stress analysis are coupled with an appropriate failure criterion. Traditional failure criteria based on maximum stress, strain or energy density cannot adequately explain many structural failures that occurred at stress levels considerably lower than the ultimate strength of the material. On the other hand, experiments performed by Griffith in 1921 on glass fibers led to the conclusion that the strength of real materials is much smaller, typically by two orders of magnitude, than the theoretical strength. The discipline of fracture mechanics has been created in an effort to explain these phenomena. It is based on the realistic assumption that all materials contain crack-like defects from which failure initiates. Defects can exist in a material due to its composition, as second-phase particles, debonds in composites, etc. , they can be introduced into a structure during fabrication, as welds, or can be created during the service life of a component like fatigue, environment-assisted or creep cracks. Fracture mechanics studies the loading-bearing capacity of structures in the presence of initial defects. A dominant crack is usually assumed to exist.

This Festschrift marks the retirement of Professor Chris Calladine, FRS after 42 years on the teaching staff of the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. It contains a series of papers contributed by his former students, colleagues, and friends. Chris Calladine's research has ranged very widely across the field of struc tural mechanics, with a particular focus on the plastic deformation of solids and structures, and the behaviour of thin-shell structures. His insightful books on Engineering Plasticity and Theory of Shell Structures have been appreciated by many generations of students at Cambridge and elsewhere. His scientific contri bution outside engineering, in molecular structures, is at least as significant, and he is unique among engineers in having co-authored a book on DNA. Also, he has been keenly interested in the research of many students and colleagues, and on many occasions his quick grasp and physical insight have helped a student, and sometimes a colleague, find the nub of the problem without unnecessary effort. Many of the papers contained in this volume gratefully acknowledge this generous contribution. We thank Professor G. M. l. Gladwell for reading through all of the contri butions, Mrs R. Baxter and Mrs o. Constantinides for help in preparing this volume, Godfrey Argent Studio for permission to reproduce Calladine's por trait for the Royal Society, and Dr A. Schouwenburg -from Kluwer- for his assistance. Horace R. Drew Sergio Pellegrino ix CHRIS CALLADINE SOME THOUGHTS ON RESEARCH c. R."

This book provide a series of designs, materials, characterization and modeling, that will help create safer and stronger structures in coastal areas. The authors take a look at the different materials (porous, heterogeneous, concrete...), the moisture transfers in construction materials as well as the degradation caused by external attacks and put forth systems to monitor the structures or evaluate the performance reliability as well as degradation scenarios of coastal protection systems.

This book serves as a textbook for advanced courses as it introduces state-of-the-art information and the latest research results on diverse problems in the structural wind engineering field. The topics include wind climates, design wind speed estimation, bluff body aerodynamics and applications, wind-induced building responses, wind, gust factor approach, wind loads on components and cladding, debris impacts, wind loading codes and standards, computational tools and computational fluid dynamics techniques, habitability to building vibrations, damping in buildings, and suppression of wind-induced vibrations. Graduate students and expert engineers will find the book especially interesting and relevant to their research and work.

I I This book is intended to guide practicing structural engineers into more profitable routine designs with the AISC Load and Resistance Factor Design Specification (LRFD) for structural steel buildings. LRFD is a method of proportioning steel structures so that no applica ble limit state is exceeded when the structure is subjected to all appro priate factored load combinations. Strength limit states are related to safety, and concern maximum load carrying capacity, Serviceability limit states are related to performance under service load conditions such as deflections. The term "resistance" includes both strength states and serviceability limit states. LRFD is a new approach to the design of structural steel for buildings. It involves explicit consideration of limit states, multiple load factors and resistance factors, and implicit probabilistic determination of relia bility. The type of factoring used by LRFD differs from the allowable stress design of Chapters A through M of the 1989 Ninth Edition of the AISC Specifications for Allowable Stress Design, where only the resistance is divided by a factor of safety to obtain an allowable stress, and from the plastic design provisions of Chapter N, where the loads are multi plied by a common load factor of 1.7 for gravity loads and 1.3 for gravity loads acting with wind or seismic loads. LRFD offers the structural engineer greater flexibility, rationality, and economy than the previous 1989 Ninth Edition of the AISC Specifications for Allowable Stress Design."

The availability of computers has, in real terms, moved forward the practice of structural engineering. Where it was once enough to have any analysis given a complex configuration, the profession today is much more demanding. How engineers should be more demanding is the subject of this book. In terms of the theory of structures, the importance of geometric nonlinearities is explained by the theorem which states that "In the presence of prestress, geometric nonlinearities are of the same order of magnitude as linear elastic effects in structures. " This theorem implies that in most cases (in all cases of incremental analysis) geometric nonlinearities should be considered. And it is well known that problems of buckling, cable nets, fabric structures, ... REQUIRE the inclusion of geometric nonlinearities. What is offered in the book which follows is a unified approach (for both discrete and continuous systems) to geometric nonlinearities which incidentally does not require a discussion of large strain. What makes this all work is perturbation theory. Let the equations of equilibrium for a system be written as where P represents the applied loads, F represents the member forces or stresses, and N represents the operator which describes system equilibrium.

This book explores the meta-heuristics approach called tabu search, which is dramatically changing our ability to solve a host of problems that stretch over the realms of resource planning, telecommunications, VLSI design, financial analysis, scheduling, space planning, energy distribution, molecular engineering, logistics, pattern classification, flexible manufacturing, waste management, mineral exploration, biomedical analysis, environmental conservation and scores of other problems. The major ideas of tabu search are presented with examples that show their relevance to multiple applications. Numerous illustrations and diagrams are used to clarify principles that deserve emphasis, and that have not always been well understood or applied. The book's goal is to provide hands-on' knowledge and insight alike, rather than to focus exclusively either on computational recipes or on abstract themes. This book is designed to be useful and accessible to researchers and practitioners in management science, industrial engineering, economics, and computer science. It can appropriately be used as a textbook in a masters course or in a doctoral seminar. Because of its emphasis on presenting ideas through illustrations and diagrams, and on identifying associated practical applications, it can also be used as a supplementary text in upper division undergraduate courses. Finally, there are many more applications of tabu search than can possibly be covered in a single book, and new ones are emerging every day. The book's goal is to provide a grounding in the essential ideas of tabu search that will allow readers to create successful applications of their own. Along with the essential ideas, understanding of advanced issues is provided, enabling researchers to go beyond today's developments and create the methods of tomorrow.

This book contains a collection of major research contributions over the last decade in the area of composite materials and sandwich structures supported by the Of?ce of Naval Research (ONR) under the direction of Dr. Yapa D. S. Rajapakse. The Solid Mechanics Research Program at ONR supports research in mechanics of high performancematerialsfortheeffectivedesignofdurableandaffordableNavalstr- tures. Such structures operate in severe environments, and are designed to withstand complex multi-axial loading conditions, including highly dynamic loadings. The - fective design of these structures requires an understanding of the deformation and failure characteristics of structural materials, and the ability to predict and control their performance characteristics. The major focus is on mechanics of composite materials and composite sandwich structures. The program deals with understa- ing and modeling the physical processes involved in the response of glass-?ber and carbon-?ber reinforced composite materials and composite sandwich structures to static, cyclic, and dynamic, multi-axial loading conditions, in severe environments (sea water, moisture, temperature extremes, and hydrostatic pressure). This anthology consists of 30 chapters written by ONR contractors and rec- nized experts in their ?elds and serves as a reference and guide for future research.

This book is an outgrowth of the proceedings for the Geotechnical Symposium in Roma, which was held on March 16 and 17, 2006 in Rome, Italy. The Symposium was organized to celebrate the 60th birthday of Prof. Tatsuoka as well as honoring his research achievement. The publications are focused on the recent developments in the stress-strain behavior of geomaterials, with an emphasis on laboratory measurements, soil constitutive modeling and behavior of soil structures (such as reinforced soils, piles and slopes). The latest advancement in the field, such as the rate effect and dynamic behavior of both clay and sand, behavior of modified soils and soil mixtures, and soil liquefaction are addressed. A special keynote paper by Prof. Tatsuoka is included with three other keynote papers (presented by Prof. Lo Presti, Prof. Di Benedetto, and Prof. Shibuya).

Laminated Composite Plates and Shells presents a systematic and comprehensive coverage of the three-dimensional modelling of these structures. It uses the state space approach to provide novel tools for accurate three-dimensional analyses of thin and thick structural components composed of laminated composite materials. In contrast to the traditional treatment of laminated materials, the state space method guarantees a continuous interfacial stress field across material boundaries. Other unique features of the analysis include the non-dependency of a problem's degrees of freedom on the number of material layers of a laminate. Apart from the introductions to composite materials, three-dimensional elasticity and the concept of state space equations presented in the first three chapters, the book reviews available analytical and numerical three-dimensional state space solutions for bending, vibration and buckling of laminated composite plates and shells of various shapes. The applications of the state space method also include the analyses of piezoelectric laminates and interfacial stresses near free edges. The book presents numerous tables and graphics that show accurate three-dimensional solutions of laminated structural components. Many of the numerical results presented in the book are important in their own right and also as test problems for validating new numerical methods. Laminated Composite Plates and Shells will be of benefit to all materials and structural engineers looking to understand the detailed behaviour of these important materials. It will also interest academic scientists researching that behaviour and engineers from more specialised fields such as aerospace which are becoming increasingly dependent on composites.

This book discusses analytical tools for designing energy efficient and lightweight structures that embody the concept of tensegrity. The book provides both static and dynamic analysis of special tensegrity structural concepts, which are motivated by biological material architecture. This is the first book written to attempt to integrate structure and control design.

Structural optimization - a survey.- Mathematical optimization: an introduction.- Design optimization with the finite element program ANSYSR.- B&B: a FE-program for cost minimization in concrete design.- The CAOS system.- Shape optimization with program CARAT.- DYNOPT: a program system for structural optimization weight minimum design with respect to various constraints.- MBB-Lagrange: a computer aided structural design system.- The OASIS-ALADDIN structural optimization system.- The structural optimization system OPTSYS.- SAPOP: an optimization procedure for multicriteria structural design.- SHAPE: a structural shape optimization program.- STARS: mathematical foundations.

Civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, stadiums, and offshore structures play an import role in our daily life. However, constructing these structures requires lots of budget. Thus, how to cost-efficiently design structures satisfying all required design constraints is an important factor to structural engineers. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimal techniques have been applied to the design of optimal structures. While, many practical engineering optimal problems are very complex and hard to solve by traditional method. In the past few decades, swarm intelligence algorithms, which were inspired by the social behaviour of natural animals such as fish schooling and bird flocking, were developed because they do not require conventional mathematical assumptions and thus possess better global search abilities than the traditional optimization algorithms and have attracted more and more attention. These intelligent based algorithms are very suitable for continuous and discrete design variable problems such as ready-made structural members and have been vigorously applied to various structural design problems and obtained good results. This book gathers the authors' latest research work related with particle swarm optimizer algorithm and group search optimizer algorithm as well as their application to structural optimal design. The readers can understand the full spectrum of the algorithms and apply the algorithms to their own research problems.

"

Science is for those who learn; poetry for those who know. -Joseph Roux This book is a continuation of my previous book, Dynamics and Control of Structures [44]. The expanded book includes three additional chapters and an additional appendix: Chapter 3, "Special Models"; Chapter 8, "Modal Actuators and Sensors"; and Chapter 9, "System Identification. " Other chapters have been significantly revised and supplemented with new topics, including discrete-time models of structures, limited-time and -frequency grammians and reduction, almo- balanced modal models, simultaneous placement of sensors and actuators, and structural damage detection. The appendices have also been updated and expanded. Appendix A consists of thirteen new Matlab programs. Appendix B is a new addition and includes eleven Matlab programs that solve examples from each chapter. In Appendix C model data are given. Several books on structural dynamics and control have been published. Meirovitch's textbook [108] covers methods of structural dynamics (virtual work, d'Alambert's principle, Hamilton's principle, Lagrange's and Hamilton's equations, and modal analysis of structures) and control (pole placement methods, LQG design, and modal control). Ewins's book [33] presents methods of modal testing of structures. Natke's book [111] on structural identification also contains excellent material on structural dynamics. Fuller, Elliot, and Nelson [40] cover problems of structural active control and structural acoustic control.

This book offers an integrated introduction to the topic of stability and vibration. Strikingly, it describes stability as a function of boundary conditions and eigenfrequency as a function of both boundary conditions and column force. Based on a post graduate course held by the author at the University of Southern Denmark, it reports on fundamental formulas and makes uses of graphical representation to promote understanding. Thanks to the emphasis put on analytical methods and numerical results, the book is meant to make students and engineers familiar with all fundamental equations and their derivation, thus stimulating them to write interactive and dynamic programs to analyze instability and vibrational modes.

Leading international researchers and practitioners of bifurcations and instabilities in geomechanics debate the developments and applications which have occurred over the last few decades. The topics covered include modeling of bifurcation, structural failure of geomaterials and geostructures, advanced analytical, numerical and experimental techniques, and application and development of generalised continuum models etc. In addition analytical solutions, numerical methods, experimental techniques, and case histories are presented. Beside fundamental research findings, applications in geotechnical, petroleum, mining, and bulk materials engineering are emphasised.

This text is an introduction to the dynamics of active structures and to the feedback control of lightly damped flexible structures; the emphasis is placed on basic issues and simple control strategies that work.

Now in its third edition, more chapters have been added, and comments and feedback from readers have been taken into account, while at the same time the unique premise of bridging the gap between structure and control has remained. Many examples and problems bring the subject to life and take the audience from theory to practice.

The book has chapters dealing with some concepts in structural dynamics; electromagnetic and piezoelectric transducers; piezoelectric beam, plate and truss; passive damping with piezoelectric transducers; collocated versus non-collocated control; active damping with collocated systems; vibration isolation; state space approach; analysis and synthesis in the frequency domain; optimal control; controllability and observability; stability; applications; tendon control of cable structures; active control of large telescopes; and semi-active control. The book concludes with an exhaustive bibliography and index.

This book is intended for structural engineers who want to acquire some background in vibration control; it can be used as a textbook for a graduate course on vibration control or active structures.

A solutions manual is available through the publisher to teachers using this book as a textbook.

Any practitioner who takes his profession in earnest, such that daily work is not a heavy duty but part of their life, will recognize in this book the rigorousness of the analysis and the comprehensive presentation of the problems. This professional attitude is solely able to make the research and design engineer deal with strength structures and their behaviour. Indeed, the computational means that are nowadays available permit the numerical computation of whatever problem; the pro gram libraries are extremely rich and programs themselves have developed intensively. Howeyer, though computers are available at any moment without restrictions on the frequency with which they are employed, they finally impoYerish the creative compe tency of the civil engineer. Thus, he will calculate increasingly more while devising increasingly less. He will draw less and less on the experience gained in devising and implementing bearing structures because the computational process can be repeated as often as desired over a minimum time-period by means of the available programs. \Ve note that nowadays structures are no longer investigated or economically designed to comply with the requirements of the topic of interest.: Much to the contrary, the solutions are chosen so as to comply with the capabilities of the programs. A bearing structure lives as is prescribed by its initial con structive data."

Concrete is an integral part of twenty-first century structural engineering and an understanding of how to analyze and design concrete structures is a vital part of your training as a structural engineer. With eurocode legislation increasingly replacing British Standards it 's also important to know how this affects the way you can work with concrete.

Newly revised to Eurocode 2, this second edition retains the original 's emphasis on qualitative understanding of the overall behaviour of concrete structures. Now expanded, with a new chapter dedicated to case studies, worked examples and exercise examples it 's an even more comprehensive guide to conceptual design, analysis and detailed design of concrete structures.
The book provides civil and structural engineering students with complete coverage of the analysis and design of reinforced and prestressed concrete structures. Great emphasis is placed on developing a qualitative understanding of the overall behaviour of structures.

Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques for the inspection of industrial structural components have to be qualified in respect to the minimum performance to be achieved. The qualification schemes relate to all aspects of the tests: procedure, equipment and personnel and the qualification of inspection should be codified in Standards. Such Standards are of two main types: those that detail the methods and procedures to be used and those that define the results which must be achieved. The European Network for Inspection Qualification (ENIQ) has as its aim the creation of a European collaboration for critical studies, assessment and qualification of inspection procedures for industrial structural components. The final goal is to support international Codes and Standards bodies via technical tools, expertise and demonstrative exercises that can be sponsored and managed at the European level.

Corrugated web girders (CWGs), used for bridge construction, differ in important ways from conventional prismatic girders. Behavior and Design of Trapezoidally Corrugated Web Girders for Bridge Construction details the behavior and design of CWGs in bridge construction and includes unique research into high-strength steel. The title gives a comprehensive review of the last decade in CWG design. In-depth explanations of key concepts are given - such as the accordion effect - that differentiate these girders from more conventional flat-webbed girders, and the authors also present specialized research into tubular flanged girders. The book distinguishes between prismatic and tapered CWGs, explains failure modes under both shear and flexure, and gives clear figures to illustrate these modes. The volume compares international building codes and offers recommendations for future research. Seven chapters cover -- An introduction to CWGs for bridge construction; Development of bridges with corrugated webs; Real boundary conditions between flange and web; Shear buckling behavior; Flexural buckling behavior; Recent erection methods and; Future research.

Intended for structural engineers, this third edition text, a source on the use of matrix analysis for structures of all types, has been revised and updated.

Virtual worlds are places where humans interact, and as such they can be environments for research and learning. However, they are complex and mutable in ways that more controlled and traditional environments are not. Although computer-mediated, virtual worlds are multifaceted social systems like the offline world, and choosing to study virtual world phenomena demands as much consideration for the participants, the environment and the researcher as offline. By exploring virtual worlds as places of research and learning, the international practitioners in this book demonstrate the power of these worlds to replicate and extend our arenas of research and learning. They focus on process and outcomes and consider questions that arise from engaging in teaching and research in these spaces, including new approaches to research ethics, internationalization, localization, and collaboration in virtual worlds. This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning, Media & Technology.