Lectures on Viscoelasticity Theory

This book contains notes for a one-semester course on viscoelasticity given in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. The course serves as an introduction to viscoelasticity and as a workout in the use of various standard mathematical methods. The reader will soon find that he needs to do some work on the side to fill in details that are omitted from the text. These are notes, not a completely detailed explanation. Furthermore, much of the content of the course is in the problems assigned for solution by the student. The reader who does not at least try to solve a good many of the problems is likely to miss most of the point. Much that is known about viscoelasticity is not discussed in these notes, and references to original sources are usually not give, so it will be difficult or impossible to use this book as a reference for looking things up. Readers wanting something more like a treatise should see Ferry's Viscoelastic Properties of Polymers, Lodge's Elastic Liquids, the volumes edited by Eirich on Rheology, or any issue of the Transactions of the Society of Rheology. These works emphasize physical aspects of the subject. On the mathematical side, Gurtin and Sternberg's long paper On the Linear Theory of Viscoelasticity (ARMA II, 291 (I962 remains the best reference for proofs of theorems.