Foundations of micropolar mechanics (Q714400)

This book is devoted to the mechanics of micropolar continua or, with other words, to the mechanics of Cosserat continua. Starting from the first work on these continuous bodies, due to Cosserat brothers in 1909, there are written many books on microplar continua. Also, many papers were published in this field. The book updates already published books by using some recent results. In a micropolar medium, each material particle has six degrees of freedom, three translational and three rotational ones. These features of the Cosserat continuum model allow to describe more complex media, relevant to the actual research like micro-inhomogeneous materials, cellular solids, lattices, foams, particle assemblies, liquid crystals, and so on. There are two important aspects tracked in this book. The first one is the presentation of the basic micropolar continuum mechanics, including an introduction to stress and strain measures, derivation of equations of motion, and discussion of the differences between Cosserat continua and classical continua. The second important aspect is the discussion of more specific problems related to the constitutive modeling such as constitutive inequalities, symmetry groups, acceleration waves, and so on. Some results presented in this book are obtained by the three authors. The book could be useful to specialists working in the field of Cosserat continua or other generalized continua.