The book follows that modern trend in research and industry striving to incorporate intelligence into engineered products through microprocessors that are becoming smaller, faster, and cheaper at astounding rates. Not using them in engineered products may become an enormous liability.
Resulting from the advances in materials technology on sensors and actuator technologies as well as the availability of very powerful and reliable microprocessors, there is an ever-increasing interest in actively controlling the behavior of engineering systems. Engineers and engineering scientists must revive and broaden their activities to maximize applications for predicting and controlling the behavior of deformable bodies.
Topics include:
The technology of adaptive structures has created an environment where the analysis, not the computation, of structural response - due to actuator-inserted deformations - has become important. Problems related to the placement, the operation in real time, and the energy consumption of the actuators require the review and broadening of the theories long dormant due to the emphasis placed in the numerical simulations of structural behavior by the displacement finite element method.
This book furnishes the basic theory needed by modern engineers in the design and control of discrete parameter adaptive structures .