With its origins in the theories of continuous distributions of dislocations and ofmetalplasticity,inhomogeneitytheoryisarichandvibrant?eldofresearch. The recognition of the important role played by con?gurational or material forces in phenomena such as growth and remodelling is perhaps its greatest present-day impetus. While some excellent comprehensive works approa- ing the subject from di?erent angles have been published, the objective of this monograph is to present a point of view that emphasizes the di?erenti- geometric aspects of inhomogeneity theory. In so doing, we follow the general lines of thought that we have propounded in many publications and presen- tions over the last two decades. Although based on these sources, this book is a stand-alone entity and contains some new results and perspectives. At the same time, it does not intend to present either a historical account of the - velopment of the subject or a comprehensive picture of the various schools of thought that can be encountered by perusing scholarly journals and attending specialized symposia. The book is divided into three parts, the ?rst of which is entirely devoted to the formulation of the theory in the absence of evolution. In other words, time is conspicuously absent from Part I. It opens with the geometric ch- acterization of material inhomogeneity within the context of simple bodies in Chapter 1, followed by extensions to second-grade and Cosserat media in Chapters 2 and 3.
Inhomogeneity theory is of importance for the description of a variety of material phenomena, including continuous distributions of dislocations, fracture mechanics, plasticity, biological remodelling and growth and, more generally, all processes that entail changes in the material body driven by forces known in literature as material or configurational. This monograph presents a unified treatment of the theory using some of the tools of modern differential geometry. The first part of the book deals with the geometrical description of uniform bodies and their homogeneity (i.e., integrability) conditions. In the second part, a theory of material evolution is developed and its relevance in various applied contexts discussed. The necessary geometrical notions are introduced as needed in the first two parts but often without due attention to an uncompromising mathematical rigour. This task is left for the third part of the book, which is a highly technical compendium of those concepts of modern differential geometry that are invoked in the first two parts (differentiable manifolds, Lie groups, jets, principal fibre bundles, G-structures, connections, frame bundles, integrable prolongations, groupoids, etc.). To make the text as useful as possible to active researchers and graduate students, considerable attention has been devoted to non-standard topics, such as second-grade materials, Cosserat media and functionally graded bodies.
