Fall 2006

Although I know it is not very original, I am recommending Timoshenko's Theory of Elasticity textbook. I find this book useful because it solves many classical solid mechanics problems without assuming the reader has a strong background in the subject (like me). When I am having difficulty with a homework problem, I turn to the index and it usually directs me to a section of the book directly related to the problem, or sometimes even the solution itself. Many parts of the book complement the course, such as the chapters "Plane Stress and Plane Strain" and "Analysis of Stress and Strain in 3 Dimensions."

The book starts with basic definitions and derivations of stress and strain, then applies these equations to solve problems in different coordinate systems. It also includes chapters on more specific topics, like torsion and thermal stress.

Office hour for tomorrow (Oct. 19 Thursday) will be rescheduled as 4:00pm to 4:30pm.

Sorry about this.

It's a bit hard to recommend a text, when I have yet to find one that I really love. Currently I am working from Advanced Strength and Applied Elasticity by A.C. Ugural & S.K. Fenster. It contains all of the relevant information, though I find the explanations of the concepts a bit slim. So far is has covered all of topics we covered in class. The first four chapters seem the most relevent. These are titled Analysis of Stress; Strain and Stress-Strain Relations; Two-Dimensional Problems in Elasticity; and Failure Criteria. The rest of the text deals with more specific topics (torsion, bending, plastic behavior, etc.).

Here is a link to the Amazon page, where the book gets mediocore reviews.

Hey, people often call me Mads which circumvents the ordeal of pronouncing my "real" name correctly which can be tricky. I'm a first year PhD student in applied mathematics. I am currently trying to balance doing courses and research with Michael Brenner, L. Mahadevan and Howard Stone.

I am a first year PhD student in Aeronautics and Astronautics department at MIT. I also have obtained B.S. and M.S. from the same department. I have taken one Solid Mechanics (graduate level) course at MIT, but since it did not cover waves/vibration or nonlinear plate theory, I look forward to these new topics later in the course very much. My most research work has been done at Technology Laboratory for Advanced Materials and Composites at MIT. My M.S. thesis topic was on micro solid oxide fuel cell. The goal was to design and fabricate thin film tri-layer fuel cell structure that is thermomechanically stable at high operation temperature. We started with mechanical testing to acquire properties, and designed membranes with von Karman plate theory. My PhD topic is nano-engineered composites with carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Solid mechanics is very directly related to these structural tasks including stiffness testing. Generally, having better sense of mechanics behind and having many analysis tools will be greatly helpful. So far I have been having much fun coming to Harvard, taking a little break from MIT (I have been there more than enough, although I still love it there). I hope to learn as much as possible from this course.

Hi everyone, I am Roxanne, a G-2 student in applied physics.  My major was chemical engineering when I was an undergraduate student in Taiwan.  I had no background on mechanics then.  When I was a G-1, I took AP 293 (Deformation of Solids).  This course gave me some ideas on the plastic flow, elastic properties, and dislocations of materials. Math, like partial differential equation and tensors are pretty challenging to me…always.

Currently, I am working with Frans, and my research focus is on studying the creep phenomena in metals.

http://deas.harvard.edu/matsci/

My name is Xuanhe Zhao, and I'm a first year student in DEAS. Before joining Harvard, I got my Master Degree in Materials Engineering from University of British Columbia, Canand. I have took one course on Computational Mechanics, and read a couple of books on theory of elasticity.

 The major goal for me taking ES 240 is to learn how to understand and solve engineering problems, both familiar and unfamiliar, in a intuitive way. In addition, I will further consolidate my background in solid mechanics.

I am a first year grad student in bioengineering working in Dr. Parker's Disesase Biophysics Group (http://www.deas.harvard.edu/diseasebiophysics/). I attended Washington University in St. Louis for undergrad, where I double majored in biomedical engineering and biology and minored in chemistry. The only courses I have taken related to solid mechanics are Biomechanics and Transport Phenomena, both of which covered basic mechanics. As an undergrad, I worked in a research lab that focused on cardiac electrophysiology. The lab I am in now is interested in how the mechanical and electrical behaviors of cardiac cells are related, so I need to gain a stronger background in mechanics to match my background in electrophysiology. I hope that this class will help me develop an intuition about the mechanical behavior of objects, which I can apply to the mechanics of cellular events.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York City. At the undergraduate level, I have taken two courses related to solid mechanics: Solid Mechanics and Stress & Applied Elasticity. Though these courses covered most of the same topics, the focus was not on working with developing the equations for different situations. The majority of the work was in knowing when to apply the equations and coming up with quantitative solutions. Thus my weaknesses will be related to coming up with equations to model various stress situations.

Concerning my research, I am working with Prof. Robert Wood in the microrobotics laboratory. My focus will be on aquatic robots on the order of several centimeters in length. Because of the restrictions inherent in working at this scale, it will be important not to over-design the systems. From studying solid mechanics, I hope to gain the ability to analyze the states of stress and strain in materials such that I can effectively develop efficient systems for microrobotics.

My name is Will Adams and I am a first year grad student in BME. I have no previous courses in solid mechanics or strength of materials but I have taken two fluid mechanics courses, ES220 and ES123, as an undergrad which contain many of the same lines of thinking. Hopefully the math formalisms of these classes will help in ES240 but having no solids background leaves me with little intuition about experimental results. Hopefully I can acquire this here. I was a BME major as an undergrad here in DEAS.