This book focuses on smart materials and structures, which are also referred to as intelligent, adaptive, active, sensory, and metamorphic. The ultimate goal is to develop biologically inspired multifunctional materials with the capability to adapt their structural characteristics, monitor their health condition, perform self-diagnosis and self-repair, morph their shape, and undergo significant controlled motion.

Shells are basic structural elements of modern technology and everyday life. Examples of shell structures in technology include automobile bodies, water and oil tanks, pipelines, silos, wind turbine towers, and nanotubes. Nature is full of living shells such as leaves of trees, blooming flowers, seashells, cell membranes or wings of insects. In the human body arteries, the eye shell, the diaphragm, the skin and the pericardium are all shells as well. Shell Structures: Theory and Applications, Volume 4 contains 132 contributions presented at the 11th Conference on Shell Structures: Theory and Applications (Gdansk, Poland, 11-13 October 2017). The papers reflect a wide spectrum of scientific and engineering problems from theoretical modelling through strength, stability and dynamic behaviour, numerical analyses, biomechanic applications up to engineering design of shell structures. Shell Structures: Theory and Applications, Volume 4 will be of interest to academics, researchers, designers and engineers dealing with modelling and analyses of shell structures. It may also provide supplementary reading to graduate students in Civil, Mechanical, Naval and Aerospace Engineering.

A thorough guide to the fundamentals--and how to use them--of finite element analysis for elastic structures For elastic structures, the finite element method is an invaluable tool which is used most effectively only when one understands completely each of its facets. A Primer for Finite Elements in Elastic Structures disassembles the entire finite element method for civil engineering students and professionals, detailing its supportive theory and its mathematical and structural underpinnings, in the context of elastic structures and the principle of virtual work. The book opens with a discussion of matrix algebra and algebraic equation systems to foster the basic skills required to successfully understand and use the finite element method. Key mathematical concepts outlined here are joined to pertinent concepts from mechanics and structural theory, with the method constructed in terms of one-dimensional truss and framework finite elements. The use of these one-dimensional elements in the early chapters promotes better understanding of the fundamentals. Subsequent chapters describe many two-dimensional structural finite elements in depth, including the geometry, mechanics, transformations, and mapping needed for them. Most chapters end with questions and problems which review the text material. Answers for many of these are at the end of the book. An appendix describes how to use MATLAB(r), a popular matrix-manipulation software platform necessary to perform the many matrix operations required for the finite element method, such as matrix addition, multiplication, inversion, partitioning, rearrangement, and assembly. As an added extra, the m-files discussed can be downloaded from the Wiley FTP server.