Continuum Mechanics

4.0 credits

Continuum mechanics may be the topic that best defines and unifies mechanical engineering. The topic considers motion, deformation, flow, stresses, forces, and heat transfer as determined by the laws of mechanics. Those phenomena may occur in any materials — solids, fluids, or things in-between — that can be well-modeled as continuous, not discrete (meaning quantization effects are negligible). To handle this wide variety of phenomena and materials, we use the language of tensor mathematics, which we will build up at the beginning of the course. Applications to ongoing research of the instructor and students will be incorporated wherever possible. The course will include indicial notation and tensor analysis, concepts of stress, both Eulerian and Lagrangian descriptions of deformation and strain, conservation of mass, momentum, energy, angular momentum, and constitutive equations to describe material response.