Monographs and Textbooks on Mechanics of Solids and Fluids – serie

This book sterns from a course on Micromechanics that I started about fifteen years ago at Northwestern University. At that time, micro­ mechanics was a rather unfamiliar subject. Although I repeated the course every year, I was ne ver convinced that my notes have quite developed into a final manuscript because new topics emerged con­ stantly requiring revisions, and additions. I finally came to realize that if this is continued, then I will never complete the book to my total satisfaction. Meanwhile, T. Mori and I had coauthored a book in Micromechanics, published by Baifu-kan, Tokyo, in Japanese, entitled 1975. It received an extremely favorable response from students and researchers in Japan. This encouraged me to go ahead and publish my course notes in their latest version, as this book, which contains further development of the subject and is more comprehensive than the one published in Japanese. Micromechanics encompasses mechanics related to microstructures of materials. The method employed is a continuum theory of elasticity yet its applications cover a broad area relating to the mechanical behavior of materials: plasticity, fracture and fatigue, constitutive equa­ tions, composite materials, polycrystals, etc. These subjects are treated in this book by means of a powerful and unified method which is called the 'eigenstrain method. ' In particular, problems relating to inclusions and dislocations are most effectively analyzed by this method, and therefore, special emphasis is placed on these topics.