In my university there is a course on it in the Masters program, I’m just going to finish my Bachelors degree this year in mechanical engineering and a bit confused about where does continuum mechanics fit in the big picture. When we studied Strength of material we also assumed that the material is continuos, does that mean this is a subdivison of CM then? There is continuum mechanics and quantum mechanics as the two main parts of mechanics or what?
In: Engineering
Continuum mechanics studies how things (solid, liquid, gasses) reacts to outside forces, which some how deform, or compress the object. That is a broad topic.
It’s continuous because you ignore the microscopic properties of an object (like that steel is a special crystalline arrangement of iron and carbon atoms), and just use macroscopic properties like density, etc, which you can define for any point of your object. You ignore microscopic properties for almost all kind of descriptions in classical mechanics, but there you have normally a single property (like mass, or a inertia tensor), and dont need a field properties to fescribe the objects inner properties like in continuum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a whole different thing, which I would not really count to (classical) mechanics, but to quantum physics as it more or less infependent thing, follows fundamentally different assumptions than classical mechanics and normally you have different things you describe with it. And it’s not really relevant for mechanical engineering.
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