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Rating: 
Summary: A great reference book
Review: I found this book to be an excellent source for engineering students and practitioners. The distinguishing feature of the book is the way in which it introduces reader to complex modelling concepts in an easy to understand manner, covering both ordinary and partial differential equations. The book is rich in practical examples, and useful tables and graphs. Earlier prints suffer from typographical errors that are found to be corrected in the latest print of the book.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting book
Review: The book presents the disturbed state concept, or the concept of correction functions, as it applies to the modeling of engineering materials. The book is well written, simple to understand, and full of new ideas.I take great pride in stating that my thesis under the author, Professor C.S. Desai, at Virginia Tech in 1979 was the beginning of what the author has named "The Disturbed State Concept." The thesis was subsequently published as a book: "Fundamental Aspects of the Normality Rule and Their Role in Deriving Constitutive Laws of Soils," EP, 1980. At that time a flier for the book read, "This book which establishes a link between theoretical mechanics and engineering is the only one available of its kind." The same can be said of the book by Professor Desai. In essence, the Disturbed State Concept (DSC) says that for some materials, well founded equations of theoretical mechanics apply only when a material has attained some characteristic state called the fully adjusted state (FA) by the author. For other states, we must incorporate suitably chosen correction functions in order to model the OBSERVED material behavior. The correction functions attain a value of unity at the the characteristic state. A typical example of the characteristic state is the critical state attained by a class of geomaterials at some unique combination of stress, strain, and internal structure. The author asserts that with the help of DSC, we are able to apply some standard concepts of theoretical mechanics, e.g. the Drucker-Prager associative plasticity to a nonstandard material behavior such as nonassociative plasticity. The beauty of the concept lies in its simplicity -- to an extent that the concept appears childish at times -- yet the concept gives us a powerful tool for making some abstract notions of mechanics work for engineering. In the beginning chapter on introduction, the author sounds like a professor of Budhists Philosophy. Here is an excerpt. "For a given material, the fully adjusted state can be described as the critical state at which the material approaches the state of invariant properties......The critical state is like the state Buddhist call NIRVANA, in which all biases, pushes, and pulls, due to KARMIC action (like nonsymmetric forces on materials, say, causing shear stresses), disappear, leading to the equilibrium or isotropic state." An interesting chapter on DSC has recently appeared in the following book. "Modeling in Geomechanics," Eds. M. Zaman, G. Gioda and J. Booker, Wiley, 2000.
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