Library
Curated textbooks, courses, and research venues for mechanical engineering, polymer science, and composites — open resources first. We link, we never copy; licenses are listed on the acknowledgements page.
Free, openly licensed, and genuinely good. Start here — everything below is legal to read in full, today.
Introduction to Aerospace Structures and Materials
R. Alderliesten, TU Delft OPEN · CC BY
A full aerospace structures textbook — loads, materials, fatigue, and design philosophy — free from TU Delft.
DoITPoMS teaching & learning packages
University of Cambridge · CC BY-NC-SA
Interactive packages on polymer basics, mechanics of fibre composites, crystallinity, and dozens more.
MIT OpenCourseWare — Materials Science & Mechanical Engineering
MIT · CC BY-NC-SA
Full course materials: 3.032 Mechanical Behavior of Materials, 16.221 structural mechanics, and more.
Engineering LibreTexts
LibreTexts consortium · mostly CC BY-NC-SA
Open textbook library covering mechanics of materials, thermodynamics, and materials chemistry.
The Macrogalleria
Polymer Science Learning Center, Univ. of Southern Mississippi · free to use online
The classic beginner-friendly tour of polymer science — a perfect companion to our foundations track.
NPTEL — Composite Materials courses
IITs / Government of India · CC BY-SA (most courses)
Full video lecture series on composite mechanics and processing, free to stream.
Kent's Mechanical Engineer's Pocket-Book
William Kent (1895–1916 editions) · public domain
The classic handbook, free forever — the public-domain anchor behind our Handbook section's formula tables.
Not free — buy or borrow them. These are the sources behind the numbers in our materials database, and the canon of the field.
Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction (10th ed.)
Callister & Rethwisch · commercial
The standard first materials text; source of most of our polymer property values.
Engineering Mechanics of Composite Materials (2nd ed.)
Daniel & Ishai · commercial
Lamina data tables and laminate theory the way industry learned it; source of our UD lamina values.
Introduction to Composite Materials
Tsai & Hahn (1980) · commercial
Where T300/5208 became the reference material; origin of the Tsai–Wu criterion data we test against.
Mechanics of Composite Materials (2nd ed.)
R. M. Jones · commercial
The other classic laminate theory text — rigorous and readable.
Where the field moves. All of these are free to read — abstracts always, full text where marked open.
arXiv — cond-mat.soft (soft condensed matter)
Cornell University · open preprints
Daily preprints on polymer physics: glasses, gels, entanglement, self-assembly.
Polymers
MDPI · CC BY (fully open access)
Peer-reviewed open-access polymer journal — every paper free to read.
Composites Part B: Engineering (open-access articles)
Elsevier · mixed; OA articles marked
Leading composites journal; source of our basalt fiber review (Fiore et al., 2015).
Directory of Open Access Journals — materials science
DOAJ · open access index
Search every legitimate open-access journal in materials, mechanics, and chemistry.
Writing analysis in these fields? The platform already accepts material data contributions with a review workflow, and every calculator exports CSV with full input provenance for reproducible appendices. A dedicated research-notes workspace (write-ups attached to saved workspaces, shareable by link) is on the roadmap.
External links open the publisher's site; availability and licenses are theirs to change. Found a great open resource we're missing? It belongs here — tell us via a contribution.