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Aircraft Structures for Engineering Students - Fifth edition T. H. G. Megson Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann , The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, UK . 2013. 859pp. Illustrated. £49.99. ISBN 978-0-08-096905-3 .
When first published by Edward Arnold in 1972, all aspects of the undergraduate course were fully covered in 13 chapters and 485 pages. This fifth edition of 28 chapters and 859 pages is still presented in two parts: 'Fundamentals of Structural Analysis 'and 'Analysis of Aircraft Structures', the main body of text having changed but little over the years. Noted additions include 6 pages on rivet joints, a few more on composite structures and a few more on crack propagation, plus 28 pages devoted to a mini design study. Many new worked examples and exercises including MATLAB demonstrations have also been added.
Chapter 1, 'Basic Elasticity', introduces 3D stress notation, equilibrium and the concept of stress at a point, followed by 2D topics, such as plane stress, stresses on included planes, principal stresses, Mohr's circle, temperature effects and strain gauge measurement techniques.
Chapter 2, 'Two-Dimensional Problems in Elasticity', provides a substantial introduction to airy stress functions and the inverse/semi-inverse methods. However, the author concedes that 'the obvious disadvantage of the Inverse Method is that we are devising problems to fit assumed solutions, whereas in structural analysis the reverse is the case'.
Notwithstanding the author's valuation (of the inverse method) numerous other examples (of stress functions) attributed to Prandtl and St. Venant are applied to the 'Torsion of Solid Sections' in Chapter 3. The membrane analogy introduced in Section 3.3 is also of interest.
Chapter 4, 'Virtual Work and Energy Methods', paves the way for a more detailed study of energy methods in Chapter 5. The principle of virtual work is described on page 91 as: 'the most fundamental and powerful tool available for the analysis of statically indeterminate structures' and has the advantage of being applicable to problems that lie beyond the elastic range. But only elastic statically determinate problems are considered here.
More useful perhaps, 'Energy Methods' (Chapter 5) demonstrates how complementary energy (described as a purely...