ABSTRACT
Materials, such as solids, liquids and gases, are composed of molecules separated by “empty” space. Continuum means the matter in the body is continuously distributed and fills the entire region of space it occupies with no empty space. A continuum can be thought of as an infinite set of vanishingly small particles, connected together. The material point or the particle can be defined as a smallest piece of matter containing a large number of molecules within an infinitesimally small volume whose physical dimensions are so small that it may be regarded as concentrated at a point. The French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy was the first to formulate such models in the 19th century, but research in the area continues today. Continuum mechanics, a scientific discipline, is a branch of mechanics that deals with the analysis of the kinematics and the mechanical behavior of substances under the influence of external agents that make changes in the state of medium.
