Microcontinuum field theories extend classical field theories to microscopic spaces and short time scales. This volume is concerned with the kinematics of microcontinua. It begins with a discussion of strain, stress tensors, balance laws, and constitutive equations, and then discusses applications of the fundamental ideas to the theory of elasticity. The ideas developed here are important in modeling the fluid or elastic properties of porous media, polymers, liquid crystals, slurries, and composite materials.

This volume extends and applies the ideas developed in Volume I, Microcontinuum Field Theories: Foundations and Solids, to liquid crystals, biological fluids and other microstretch and micomorphic fluids. It also discusses the properties of materials beyond the scope of classical field theories.

Microcontinuum field theories extend classical field theories to microscopic spaces and short time scales. This volume is concerned with the kinematics of microcontinua. It begins with a discussion of strain, stress tensors, balance laws, and constitutive equations, and then discusses applications of the fundamental ideas to the theory of elasticity. The ideas developed here are important in modeling the fluid or elastic properties of porous media, polymers, liquid crystals, slurries, and composite materials.

Nonlocal continuum field theories are concerned with material bodies whose behavior at any interior point depends on the state of all other points in the body -- rather than only on an effective field resulting from these points -- in addition to its own state and the state of some calculable external field. Nonlocal field theory extends classical field theory by describing the responses of points within the medium by functionals rather than functions (the "constitutive relations" of classical field theory). Such considerations are already well known in solid-state physics, where the nonlocal interactions between the atoms are prevalent in determining the properties of the material. The tools developed for crystalline materials, however, do not lend themselves to analyzing amorphous materials, or materials in which imperfections are a major part of the structure. Nonlocal continuum theories, by contrast, can describe these materials faithfully at scales down to the lattice parameter. This book presents a unified approach to field theories for elastic solids, viscous fluids, and heat-conducting electromagnetic solids and fluids that include nonlocal effects in both space and time (memory effects). The solutions to the field equations agree remarkably well with atomic theories and experimental observations.

Defects, dislocations and the general theory.- Approaches to generalized continua.- Generalized continuum modelling of crystal plasticity.- Introduction to discrete dislocation dynamics. The book contains four lectures on generalized continua and dislocation theory, reflecting the treatment of the subject at different scales. G. Maugin provides a continuum formulation of defects at the heart of which lies the notion of the material configuration and the material driving forces of in-homogeneities such as dislocations, disclinations, point defects, cracks, phase-transition fronts and shock waves. C. Sansour and S. Skatulla start with a compact treatment of linear transformation groups with subsequent excursion into the continuum theory of generalized continua. After a critical assessment a unified framework of the same is presented. The next contribution by S. Forest gives an account on generalized crystal plasticity. Finally, H. Zbib provides an account of dislocation dynamics and illustrates its fundamental importance at the smallest scale. In three contributions extensive computational results of many examples are presented.