Course abstract

Experimental methods exploit a particular physical phenomenon to make measurements and hence only certain information that can be recorded by an experimental technique. The course introduces the physical principle used by various experimental techniques and also provides a guideline to select an experimental technique for a given application. The role of analytical, numerical and experimental methods in solving a problem in solid mechanics is discussed.
Stress and strain at a point is discussed in most courses on solid mechanics but little attention is paid on the variation of these quantities over the field of the model. Attention is drawn on the richness of whole field information provided by most of the optical techniques.