Amazon.com description: Product Description: Plastics and rubber materials, or polymers, are increasingly the first choice of engineers where reliable cost-effective performance and safety are essential. Already the volume of polymers used in the Western economy well exceeds that of metals. Today's engineers must therefore have a thorough grounding in the properties and applications of polymeric materials: the first edition of this book in 1983 was a general textbook on engineering with polymers. This is a substantially revised and enlarged edition. The first chapters explain what polymers are, how they behave and how articles are made from them. Next the authors show how the standard engineering techniques of stress analysis, structures, fluid mechanics and heat transfer and design can be adopted or adapted to cover plastics and rubber materials. The penultimate chapter deals with interactions between processing and properties. The final new chapter describes a variety of approaches to design of plastics products ranging from practical advice to the use or further development of theoretical principles backed up by examples and case-studies. An important feature of the book is the many problems which readers can use to test and develop their understanding - full answers to these problems are provided. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and graduates of materials science and engineering.