Giulio Maier – författare

The question whether a structure or a machine component can carry the applied loads, and with which margin of safety, or whether it will become unserviceable due to collapse or excessive inelastic deformations, has always been a major concern for civil and mechanical engineers. The development of methods to answer this technologically crucial question without analysing the evolution of the system under varying loads, has a long tradition that can be traced back even to the times of emerging mechanical sciences in the early 17th century. However, the scientific foundations of the theories underlying these methods, nowadays frequently called "direct", were established sporadically in the Thirties of the 20th century and systematically and rigorously in the Fifties. Further motivations for the development of direct analysis techniques in applied mechanics of solids and structures arise from the circumstance that in many engineering situations the external actions fluctuate according to time histories not a priori known except for some essential features, e.g. variation intervals. In such situations the critical events (or "limit states") to consider, besides plastic collapse, are incremental collapse (or "ratchetting") and alternating plastic yielding, namely lack of "shakedown". Non evolutionary, direct methods for ultimate limit state analysis of structures subjected to variably-repeated external actions are the objectives of most papers collected in this book, which also contains a few contributions on related topics.

This book presents the second volume of Piola’s original Italian text together with the English-language translation and comments, showing convincingly that Gabrio Piola’s work must still be regarded as a modern theory.

This volume presents and discusses recent advances in Boundary Element Methods (BEM) and their solid mechanics applications in those areas where these numerical methods prove to be the ideal solution tool. The aim is to illustrate these methods in their most recent forms developed during the last five to ten years and demonstrate their advantages when solving a wide range of solid mechanics problems encountered in many branches of engineering, such as civil, mechanical or aeronautical engineering.

This book deals with the safety assessment of structures and structural components, possibly operating beyond the elastic limits under variable repeated thermo-mechanical loads. Examples of such situations can be found both in mechanical and civil engineering (e.g. transportation technologies, pressure vessels, pipelines, offshore platforms, dams, pavements and buildings in seismic zones). So-called ?direct? methods are focused, based on the shakedown theorems and their specialisation to limit theorems. These methods are receiving increased attention for the prediction of structural failure because they provide the information that is essential in practice (e.g. safety factor and collapse mechanisms) by more economical procedures than step-by-step inelastic analysis; also, they only need a minimum of information on the evolution of loads as functions of time. The addressed audience are primarily engineers and scientists active in Structural Engineering and Safety and Reliability Analysis.

Gabrio Piola works had an enormous impact on the development of applied mathematics and continuum mechanics. An excellent scientific committee who took it upon themselves to translate his complete works. In a second step, they commented Piola’s work and compared it to modern theories in mechanics in order to stress Piola’s impact on modern science and proofs that he has set milestones in applied mathematics.This book presents Piola's original Italian text together with ist translations and their comments. It shows impressively that Gabrio Piola’s work must still be regarded as a modern theory.

Gabrio Piola works had an enormous impact on the development of applied mathematics and continuum mechanics. An excellent scientific committee who took it upon themselves to translate his complete works. In a second step, they commented Piola’s work and compared it to modern theories in mechanics in order to stress Piola’s impact on modern science and proofs that he has set milestones in applied mathematics.This book presents Piola's original Italian text together with ist translations and their comments. It shows impressively that Gabrio Piola’s work must still be regarded as a modern theory.

This book presents the second volume of Piola’s original Italian text together with the English-language translation and comments, showing convincingly that Gabrio Piola’s work must still be regarded as a modern theory. Gabrio Piola’s work has had an enormous impact on the development of applied mathematics and continuum mechanics. As such, a committee of scientific experts took it upon themselves to translate his complete works. In a second step, they commented on Piola’s work and compared it to modern theories in mechanics in order to stress Piola’s impact on modern science and prove and confirm that he achieved significant milestones in applied mathematics.