Bifurcation Analysis in Geomechanics





Preface

This book by Vardoulakis and Sulem is an outstanding contribution to the important

field of geomechanics and will also be useful to the many branches of engineering and

applied science, particularly those dealing with mechanical behavior.

Following a self-contained Introduction, chapter 2 introduces the basic concepts from

continuum mechanics and thermodynamics before the incremental formulation of

standard continuum mechanics, particularly useful for stability and bifurcation

problems, is presented in chapter 3. This formalism is employed in chapter 4 to analyze

in detail buckling and interface instabilities, including multilayered and cracked media

which offer a natural stimulus for introducing the concept of Crosserat continuum.

Chapter 5 provides an updated contribution to the mechanics of water-saturated

media. It takes Biot’s original contribution to a new level of understanding, including

important physical phenomena such as grain crushing and non-Darcean flow. It uses

the essentials of mixture formalism but achieves a great economy of postulates and

mathematical generalizations with no direct physical interpretation.

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