| dc.description.abstract | This work was originally planned as a textbook exploiting the structure of the Theory of Mixtures as the basis for the study of porous elasticity. The decision to write this book was made approximately thirty years ago! At that time, I was a faculty member in Mechanical Engineering at Rice University. It is an understatement to observe that it has taken awhile to complete, even partially, this project. I encountered a lot of diversions along the way. Not the least of which was an eight year period where I served as President of Texas A&M University. Prior to that time, I was a Dean of Engineering at Kentucky, an administrator at the National Science Foundation and a Provost and Interim President at Oklahoma State University. During my time as an administrator, I never lost my ambition to prepare this textbook. On occasion, during periods of relative calm or, at the other extreme, during periods of great stress, I would find comfort in returning to my manuscript. It would take someone not trained in Engineering to understand why I would find comfort thinking about this book when caught up in the tangles of university administration. This work is organized into ten chapters. It begins in Chapter 1 with a brief review of classical porous media models. Chapter 2 introduces the essentials of the theory of mixtures. Chapters 3,4 and 5 exploit the theory of mixtures to formulate various models of porous elastic materials. Chapter 6 is concerned with establishing connections between the formulation given in this work and other important formulations. Chapters 7, 8,9 and 10 contain various calculations which utilize the models formulated in earlier chapters. | en |
