This book contains the edited version of invited lectures presented at the IUTAM-Sym- sium Synthesis in Bio Solid Mechanics, held at Hotel Frederiksdal, Virum (Copenhagen), Denmark, May 24 to May 27, 1998. The symposium was attended by 48 scientist from 14 countries. Biomechanics has been a very active research area in the last 25 years and covers a very broad class of problems. The present symposium concentrated on the solid mechanics - main of biomechanics, where important problems of synthesis presently are an active and challenging part. Characteristics of biomechanical materials are not only the inhomogeneity and anisotropy, but also the capability to change in relation to actual use. These living materials call for new methods of analysis and also new methods for synthesis. By the synthesis in this context is meant design of implants or artificial control of material growth. Bone mechanics is closely related to recent work on analysis and design of microstructural anisotropic materials. Also, recent work in shape design can to some extent be useful in the more complicated problems of biomechanics. Here interface problems play an essential role. The symposium brought together scientists from mechanics, mathematics and medicine.

This Volume constitutes the Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium on 'Scaling Laws in Ice Mechanics and Ice Dynamics', held in Fairbanks, Alaska from 13th to 16th of June 2000. Ice mechanics deals with essentially intact ice: in this discipline, descriptions of the motion and deformation of Arctic/ Antarctic and river/lake ice call for the development of physically based constitutive and fracture models over an enormous range in scale: 0.01 m - 10 km. Ice dynamics, on the other hand, deals with the movement of broken ice: descriptions of an aggregate of ice floes call for accurate modeling of momentum transfer through the sea/ice system, again over an enormous range in scale: 1 km (floe scale) - 500 km (basin scale). For ice mechanics, the emphasis on lab-scale (0.01 - 0.5 m) research con trasts with applications at the scale of order 1 km (ice-structure interaction, icebreaking); many important upscaling questions remain to be explored.

Phase transition phenomena in solids are of vital interest to physicists, materials scientists, and engineers who need to understand and model the mechanical behavior of solids during various kinds of phase transformations. This volume is a collection of 29 written contributions by distinguished invited speakers from 14 countries to the IUTAM Symposium on Mechanics of Martensitic Phase Transformation in Solids, the first IUTAM Symposium focusing on this topic. It contains basic theoretical and experimental aspects of the recent advances in the mechanics research of martensitic phase transformations. The main topics include microstructure and interfaces, material instability and its propagation, micromechanics approaches, interaction between plasticity and phase transformation, phase transformation in thin films, single and polycrystalline shape memory alloys, shape memory polymers, TRIP steels, etc. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the research covered, this volume will be of interest to researchers, graduate students and engineers in the field of theoretical and applied mechanics as well as materials science and technology.

Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium held in Cracow, Poland, 24-27 September 2002

This book is a collection of selected reviewed papers that were presented at the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Symposium "Mechanical waves for composite structures characterization". The Symposium took place June 14-17, 2000 in Chania, Crete, Greece. As is customary, IUTAM Symposia Proceedings are published in the series "Solid Mechanics and Its Applications" by Kluwer Academic Publishers. I am indebted to Professor G. M. L. Gladwell who is the series editor. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to Professor M. A. Hayes the Secretary General of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and a member ofthe Symposium's Scientific Committee. His constant encouragement and support made the Symposium not only possible but also successful. To the success also contributed all the members of the Symposium's Scientific Committee which I had the honor to chair. I express my appreciation to each one of them who are: Professor J. D. Achenbach (Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA), Professor M. A. Hayes (University College, Dublin, Ireland), Professor K. J. Langenberg (University of Kassel, Germany), Professor A. K. Mal (University of California, Los Angeles, USA), Professor X. Markenscoff (University of California, San Diego, USA), Professor S. Nair (Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA), Professor R. W. Ogden (University of Glasgow, UK), Professor G.

Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium held in Liverpool, UK, 8-11 July 2002

This is the first book of robotics presenting solutions of uncoupled and fully-isotropic parallel robotic manipulators and a method for their structural synthesis. Part 1 presents the methodology proposed for structural synthesis. Part 2 presents the various topologies of parallel robots generated by this systematic approach. Many solutions are presented here for the first time. The book will contribute to a widespread implementation of these solutions in industrial products.

New developments in the applications of fracture mechanics to engineering problems have taken place in the last years. Composite materials have extensively been used in engineering problems. Quasi-brittle materials including concrete, cement pastes, rock, soil, etc. all benefit from these developments. Layered materials and especially thin film/substrate systems are becoming important in small volume systems used in micro and nanoelectromechancial systems (MEMS and NEMS). Nanostructured materials are being introduced in our every day life. In all these problems fracture mechanics plays a major role for the prediction of failure and safe design of materials and structures. These new challenges motivated the author to proceed with the second edition of the book. The second edition of the book contains four new chapters in addition to the ten chapters of the first edition. The fourteen chapters of the book cover the basic principles and traditional applications, as well as the latest developments of fracture mechanics as applied to problems of composite materials, thin films, nanoindentation and cementitious materials. Thus the book provides an introductory coverage of the traditional and contemporary applications of fracture mechanics in problems of utmost technological importance. With the addition of the four new chapters the book presents a comprehensive treatment of fracture mechanics. It includes the basic principles and traditional applications as well as the new frontiers of research of fracture mechanics during the last three decades in topics of contemporary importance, like composites, thin films, nanoindentation and cementitious materials. The book contains fifty example problems and more than two hundred unsolved problems. A "Solutions Manual" is available upon request for course instructors from the author.

This textbook on models and modeling in mechanics introduces a new unifying approach to applied mechanics: through the concept of the open scheme, a step-by-step approach to modeling evolves. The unifying approach enables a very large scope on relatively few pages: the book treats theories of mass points and rigid bodies, continuum models of solids and fluids, as well as traditional engineering mechanics of beams, cables, pipe flow and wave propagation.

The essential aim of this book is to consider a wide set of problems arising in the mathematical modeling of mechanical systems under unilateral constraints. In these investigations elastic and non-elastic deformations, friction and adhesion phenomena are taken into account. All the necessary mathematical tools are given: local boundary value problem formulations, construction of variational equations and inequalities and their transition to minimization problems, existence and uniqueness theorems, and variational transformations (Friedrichs and Young-Fenchel-Moreau) to dual and saddle-point search problems.