This book offers comprehensive coverage of topics used in engineering solutions for the stiffness and strength of physical systems, with a range of scales from micrometers to kilometers. Coverage integrates a wide array of topics into a unified text, including such subjects as plasticity, fracture, composite materials, energy approaches, and mechanics of microdevices (MEMs). This integrated and unified approach reflects the reality of modern technology with its demands to learn the fundamentals of new subjects quickly.

This book offers comprehensive coverage of topics used in engineering solutions for the stiffness and strength of physical systems, with a range of scales from micrometers to kilometers. Coverage integrates a wide array of topics into a unified text, including such subjects as plasticity, fracture, composite materials, energy approaches, and mechanics of microdevices (MEMs). This integrated and unified approach reflects the reality of modern technology with its demands to learn the fundamentals of new subjects quickly.

Offers designers and users of mechanical systems an overview of structural stiffness and damping and their critical roles in mechanical design. The text assesses the relationship between stiffness and damping parameters in mechanical systems and structural materials. An accompanying disk contains detailed analyses of stiffness- and damping-critical systems.

This expanded and fully updated Handbook contains new results and adds some significant modifications, most notably a new section on "Negative Stiffness and Damping," which is critical for understanding dynamic processes in mechanical systems. The book will be useful for practicing engineers working in the field of machine design, design of machine elements, machine dynamics, mechatronics, robotics and precision engineering. It will also be a useful reference for educators, as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

This volume contains the papers presented at IALCCE2016, the fifth International Symposium on Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE2016), to be held in Delft, The Netherlands, October 16-19, 2016. It consists of a book of extended abstracts and a DVD with full papers including the Fazlur R. Khan lecture, keynote lectures, and technical papers from all over the world. All major aspects of life-cycle engineering are addressed, with special focus on structural damage processes, life-cycle design, inspection, monitoring, assessment, maintenance and rehabilitation, life-cycle cost of structures and infrastructures, life-cycle performance of special structures, and life-cycle oriented computational tools. The aim of the editors is to provide a valuable source for anyone interested in life-cycle of civil infrastructure systems, including students, researchers and practitioners from all areas of engineering and industry.

This book is intended for systems analysts, designers, developers, users, experts, as well as those involved in quality, risk, safety and security management, and, of course, scientists and students. The various sets of original and traditional probabilistic models and interesting results of their applications to the research of different systems are presented. The models are understandable and applicable for solving system engineering problems: to optimize system requirements, compare different processes, rationale technical decisions, carry out tests, adjust technological parameters, and predict and analyze quality and risks. The engineering decisions, scientifically proven by the proposed models and software tools, can provide purposeful, essential improvement of quality and mitigation of risks, and reduce the expense of operating systems. Models, methods, and software tools can also be used in education for system analysis and mathematical modeling on specializations, for example "systems engineering," "operations research," "enterprise management," "project management," "risk management," "quality of systems," "safety and security," "smart systems," "system of systems," etc.