Book excerpt: Offers practical coverage of vibration stresses and stress-induced displacements, isolation of sensitive components, and evaluation of elastic instability, fatigue and fracture as potential failure modes that arise in mechanical designs and aerospace. The approach taken is particularly useful in the early design stage--the physical problem is defined via known paramaters and a methodology is given for determining the unknown quantities and relating them to specified limiting values and failure modes to obtain an acceptable design. Many of the calculations can be performed on a PC or programmable calculator.