PRINCIPLES AND APPROACHES OF ADVANCED EXPERIMENTAL MECHANICS IN SERVICE OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY

摘要

The recent progress in several fields of science and technology, together with the rapidly increasing societal awareness of technological risk, has exposed serious essential methodological deficiencies in various procedures of applied mechanics, particularly in the analytical and experimental mechanics. One can observe an existing and growing dichotomy between the scientific and intellectual levels of the research in mechanics serving high technology, and the level of the traditional engineering research. That dichotomy results in unnecessary and easily avoidable design deficiencies and costly structural failures. This paper presents some typical examples of existing dichotomies, and an outline of the basic features of approaches, methods and techniques of analytical and experimental procedures which is called an advanced experimental mechanics. It is shown that it is very practical in engineering research to accept the modern scientific methodology, to test the chosen approach against the principles of scientific research, and to assess critically the influence of the momentarily prevailing paradigms in engineering teaching and practice. The pertinent particular issues are given a more extensive treatment in the representative list of references.