| | Fundamentals of Structural Mechanics By Keith D. Hjelmstad
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Book Description:
This volume is an introduction to basic continuum mechanics that emphasizes variational formulations and numeric computation. This provides the prerequisite information for finite elements for graduate and advances undergraduate students in civil and mechanical engineering - a required course for all mechanical and civil engineering students.
Until you've looked over some of the more advanced solid mechanics texts such as Marsden and Hughes, Love, or Timoshenko, you won't understand the virtues of this book. Likewise, without a cursory knowledge of FEM, you understand the main thrust of this book, which is to teach the student just enough sold/structural mechanics and mathematics that they can approximate the solution using the Ritz method. The author covers quite a bit of ground in a small amount of space: tensors, tensor calculus, kinematics, equilibrium, constitutive laws, boundary value problems, the Ritz method, beams, plates, energy methods, stability, and nonlinear solution techniques. Dr. Hjelmstad introduces these topics to the reader with lucid prose, and he always gives a physical, logical, or practical justification for the mathematical gymnastics to come. By concentrating on the big ideas, the reader does not drown an abyss of algebra. The author's clear, direct style is perhaps the most attractive feature for students new to solid mechanics, but because so much is covered in this book, the advanced student will find ideas expanded in later books but in context here.
These are the main virtues of the book - it is also the main vice, because the practical step of solving solid mechanics problems is neglected. There are a few dozen solved examples in the book and a few hundred unsolved problems for the student. Without access to someone who knows how to solve these problems, the abstractions and techniques of the book are almost impossible to grasp. It would be a crime to interrupt the flow of the book, but an appendix with solution techniques, methods, and more worked problems for each chapter would be a major improvement as the book doesn't even include answers to selected problems. I have a few other minor gripes: the index isn't nearly long enough; too much time is spent on Timoshenko beams and not enough on Bernoulli-Euler beams (especially regarding boundary conditions), and small strain linear elasticity is stressed almost exclusively.
If you're a beginning student in structural mechanics looking for something more than Mohr's Circle and know someone to assist you in solving the problems, this is an excellent choice. If you want to know the very basic foundation of the computational structural mechanics, you'll want to read this book. If you want to know how to solve these problems, then you probably need to look elsewhere.
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