Continuum Damage Mechanics

Recent developments in engineering and technology have brought about serious and enlarged demands for reliability, safety and economy in wide range of fields such as aeronautics, nuclear engineering, civil and structural engineering, automotive and production industry. This, in turn, has caused more interest in continuum damage mechanics and its engineering applications.

This book aims to give a concise overview of the current state of damage mechanics, and then to show the fascinating possibility of this promising branch of mechanics, and to provide researchers, engineers and graduate students with an intelligible and self-contained textbook.

The book consists of two parts and an appendix. Part I is concerned with the foundation of continuum damage mechanics. Basic concepts of material damage and the mechanical representation of damage state of various kinds are described in Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapters 3-5, irreversible thermodynamics, thermodynamic constitutive theory and its application to the modeling of the constitutive and the evolution equations of damaged materials are descried as a systematic basis for the subsequent development throughout the book.’