Mechanics of Materials For Dummies

Your ticket to excelling in mechanics of materials

Mechanics of Materials For Dummies gives you plain-English explanations of all the topics you’ll encounter in a typical undergraduate course, including principles of equilibrium, geometric compatibility, and material behavior; stress and its relation to force and movement; strain and its relation to displacement; and methods for calculating deformations and indeterminate systems.

• Brush up on basics — get a quick refresher on math and units, a brief review of essential statics topics, and an easy-to-follow introduction to mechanics of materials
• Sharpen your skills — find out which skills you need to master, including section property calculations, internal force diagrams, and how to locate the centroid of an area
• Stop stressing — get the 411 on the basic types of stress, grasp the difference between average stress and stress at a point, and learn to transform stresses to find principal values and angles
• Strain for more — discover how objects deform in response to strain, how you compute maximum and minimum strain values, and how to determine strain orientation within an object
• Compute displacements — explore different ways to compute deformations of objects under loads for both statically determinate and indeterminate systems

Open the book and find:

• How to use mechanics to understand material behavior
• Methods for calculating stresses and strains
• Basic torsion theory
• How to calculate deformations, displacements, and angles of twist
• How to solve indeterminate systems and composite materials problems
• Mohr’s circle for transformations
• Hooke’s law for stress and strain