PREFACE This book deals with the new developments and applications of the geometric method to the nonlinear stability problem for thin non-elastic shells. There are no other published books on this subject except the basic ones of A. V. Pogorelov (1966,1967,1986), where variational principles defined over isometric surfaces, are postulated, and applied mainly to static and dynamic problems of elastic isotropic thin shells. A. V. Pogorelov (Harkov, Ukraine) was the first to provide in his monographs the geometric construction of the deformed shell surface in a post-critical stage and deriving explicitely the asymptotic formulas for the upper and lower critical loads. In most cases, these formulas were presented in a closed analytical form, and confirmed by experimental data. The geometric method by Pogorelov is one of the most important analytical methods developed during the last century. Its power consists in its ability to provide a clear geometric picture of the postcritical form of a deformed shell surface, successfully applied to a direct variational approach to the nonlinear shell stability problems. Until now most Pogorelov's monographs were written in Russian, which limited the diffusion of his ideas among the international scientific community. The present book is intended to assist and encourage the researches in this field to apply the geometric method and the related results to everyday engineering practice.

Contributed by world-renowned specialists on the occasion of Paul Germain's 80th birthday, this unique book reflects the foundational works and the intellectual influence of this author. It presents the realm of modern thermomechanics with its extraordinary wealth of applications to the behaviour of materials, whether solid or fluid. The thirty-one contributions follow an easygoing autobiographical sketch by Paul Germain, and highlight the power and richness of a methodological approach to the phenomenology of many materials. This approach combines harmoniously thermodynamics and continuum theory in order to provide exploitable, thermodynamically admissible models of a large variety of behaviours and phenomena, including those of diffusion, thermoelasticity, viscoplasticity, relaxation, hysteresis, wetting, shape-memory effects, growth, phase transitions, stability, fracture, shocks, machining of materials, microstructured solids, complex fluids, etc.