Advances in technology are demanding ever-increasing mastery over the materials being used: the challenge is to gain a better understanding of their behaviour, and more particularly of the relations between their microstructure and their macroscopic properties.

This work, of which this is the first volume, aims to provide the means by which this challenge may be met. Starting from the mechanics of deformation, it develops the laws governing macroscopic behaviour - expressed as the constitutive equations - always taking account of the physical phenomena which underlie...