Guest editorial

Citation

Guagliano, M. (2012), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Structural Integrity, Vol. 3 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijsi.2012.43603daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Structural Integrity, Volume 3, Issue 4

From ancient times, the mechanical behaviour of materials has been one of the most important factors for social and economic development and progress of people and countries. But it is from the Industrial Revolution that the characterization of the mechanical behaviour of materials became a key factor of development. At the same time, the ever deeper knowledge about the mechanical behaviour of materials and its relation with microstructure lead to more sophisticated and ambitious constructions, machines and systems. This lead also to new problems in structural integrity with an increasing need to develop new design approaches based more on analysis than on empirical tools and new experimental systems able to monitor and control the health of a structure.

This trend was confirmed during the 11th International Conference on the Mechanical Behaviour of Materials (ICM11), held in Como (Italy) during June 2011.

ICM is a conference series started in 1971 for promoting and fostering research on the mechanical behaviour of materials, to facilitate related international cooperation among scientists and engineers and to provide means for the public dissemination of the results from these efforts.

ICM11 was a successful event, with more than 600 presented papers with delegates from all the five continents. About 20 per cent of them were related to structural integrity. This is the reason why the Organizers thought to organize a Special Issue of the International Journal of Structural Integrity based on papers presented at ICM11. The first selection of the papers to be submitted for this special issue was done by the chairmen of the sessions regarding this topic. Then, a strict peer review procedure started and finally nine papers were selected for this special issue, which represents a well-balanced mixture of theoretical concepts as well as practical ones. We would like to underline that, even the papers are based on researches presented at ICM11 they are original papers, with new and unpublished data and results.

We would like to thank all the authors for their notable contributions and to the reviewers, for their effort in critically improving the papers. Thanks also to Professor T. Inoue, honorary President of ICM and to Professor S.W. Nam, now past President of ICM, for their encouragement to manage this special issue. Last but not least, thanks to the Editor-in-Chief of this journal, Professor Chris Rodopoulos, for his help and support throughout this project.

Finally, we hope that the exigent readers of the International Journal of Structural Integrity will enjoy this special issue and will find useful concepts and results for the advancement of knowledge in this important scientific field.

Mario GuaglianoGuest Editor