Sound and structural vibration : radiation, transmission and response /

Although this book on structure-fluid interaction is intended for advanced graduate students in mechanical engineering acoustics, it is one of the relatively few such volumes available in English. Fahy hopes to develop in the reader ``...an appreciation of structural vibration as a form of wave motion, a concept readily grasped by the student of physics, {{but which}} is often lacking in those reared on a diet of lumped elements and normal modes.'' The main problem categories considered are sound radiation from vibrating structures, sound transmission between regions of fluid media separated by a solid barrier, and the response of structures to excitation by incident sound fields. Fahy is equally concerned with the mathematical modeling of the physical systems of interest, the analysis of the mathematical models, and the physical interpretation of the results. The final chapter of the book, dealing with numerical methods of analysis, gives a minimal technical introduction to that subject but does provide much insight into mathematical modeling and numerical methods. The book is unreservedly recommended for all academic engineering libraries and most industrial libraries.-M. Levinson, University of Maine at Orono