Mechanics Today

Mechanics Today, Volume 5 contains some of the papers presented at a symposium to honor Eric Reissner, held at the University of California in San Diego, on June 23, 1978, under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research. The symposium provided a forum for discussing various topics related to mechanics, from the pseudo-elasticity of living tissues and compression of spherical cells to kinematically unstable space frameworks. Reissner's equations for sandwich plates are also considered. Comprised of 36 chapters, this volume begins with an analysis of the state of stress near the boundary of a thick plate by means of 'end solutions' obtained from Reissner's sheaf deformation plate theory. A deformable primary reflecting surface composed of an array of relatively small diameter circular elements is then described. The discussion then turns to the 'Taylor instability' of the surface of an elastic-plastic plate; free vibration spectrum structure of a shell of revolution; and the momentum-balance method in earthquake engineering. Subsequent chapters focus on the intrinsic equations of shell theory with some applications; stress analysis in plasticity; density-wave theory of the spiral structure of galaxies; and a mixture theory for wave propagation in anisotropic angle-ply laminates. This book will be of interest to engineers and physicists.