Advances in steel structures : proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advances in Steel Structures, 9-11 December 2002, Hong Kong, China. Volume 2

These two volumes of proceedings contain nine invited keynote papers and 130 contributed papers presented at the Third International Conference on Advances in Steel Structures (ICASS '02) held on 9-11 December 2002 in Hong Kong, China. The conference is a sequel to the First and the Second International Conferences on Advances in Steel Structures held in Hong Kong in December 1996 and 1999. The conference provides a forum for discussion and dissemination by researchers and designers of recent advances in the analysis, behaviour, design and construction of steel structures. Papers were contributed from over 18 countries around the world. They report current state-of-the art and point to future directions of structural steel research, covering a wide spectrum of topics including: beams and columns; connections; scaffolds and slender structures; cold-formed steel; composite construction; plates; shells; bridges; dynamics; impact mechanics; effects of welding; fatigue and fracture; fire performance; and analysis and design. This book is concerned with the topical problems of mechanics of advanced composite materials whose mechanical properties are controlled by high-strength and high-stiffness continuous fibers embedded in polymeric, metal, or ceramic matrix. Although the idea of combining two or more components to produce materials with controlled properties has been known and used from time immemorial, modern composites were only developed several decades ago and have now found intensive application in different fields of engineering, particularly in aerospace structures for which high strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios are required.

There already exist numerous publications that cover anisotropic elasticity, mechanics of composite materials, design, analysis, fabrication, and application of composite structures but the difference between this book and the existing ones is that this is of a more specific nature. It covers specific features of material behaviour such as nonlinear elasticity, plasticity, creep, and structural nonlinearity and discusses in detail the problems of material micro- and macro-mechanics that are only slightly touched in existing books, e.g. stress diffusion in a unidirectional material with broken fibers, physical and statistical aspects of fiber strength, coupling effects in anisotropic and laminated materials, etc.

The authors are designers of composite structures who were involved in practically all the main Soviet and then Russian projects in composite technology, and the permission of the Russian Composite Center - Central Institute of Special Machinery (CRISM) to use in this book the pictures of structures developed and fabricated in CRISM as part of the joint research and design project is much appreciated.

Mechanics and Analysis of Composite Materials consists of eight chapters progressively covering all structural levels of composite materials from their components through elementary plies and layers to laminates.
This book contains 38 papers presented at the seventh Working Conference on 'Reliability and Optimization of Structural Systems' held at Boulder, Colorado, USA, on April 2-4, 1996. The Working Conference was organized by the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Working Group 7.5 of Technical Committee 7 and was the seventh in a series of similar conferences. The objectives of the Working Group and hence this publication are:

• to promote modern structural systems optimization and reliability theory,
• to advance international co-operation in the field of structural system optimization and reliability theory,
• to stimulate research, development and application of structural system optimization and reliability theory,
• to further dissemination and exchange of information on reliability and optimization of structural systems, and
• to encourage education in structural system organization and reliability theory.

This book contains 38 papers presented at the seventh Working Conference on 'Reliability and Optimization of Structural Systems' held at Boulder, Colorado, USA, on April 2-4, 1996. The Working Conference was organized by the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Working Group 7.5 of Technical Committee 7 and was the seventh in a series of similar conferences. The objectives of the Working Group and hence this publication are:

• to promote modern structural systems optimization and reliability theory,

• to advance international co-operation in the field of structural system optimization and reliability theory,

• to stimulate research, development and application of structural system optimization and reliability theory,

• to further dissemination and exchange of information on reliability and optimization of structural systems, and

• to encourage education in structural system organization and reliability theory

This book is concerned with the topical problems of mechanics of advanced composite materials whose mechanical properties are controlled by high-strength and high-stiffness continuous fibers embedded in polymeric, metal, or ceramic matrix. Although the idea of combining two or more components to produce materials with controlled properties has been known and used from time immemorial, modern composites were only developed several decades ago and have now found intensive application in different fields of engineering, particularly in aerospace structures for which high strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios are required. There already exist numerous publications that cover anisotropic elasticity, mechanics of composite materials, design, analysis, fabrication, and application of composite structures but the difference between this book and the existing ones is that this is of a more specific nature. It covers specific features of material behaviour such as nonlinear elasticity, plasticity, creep, and structural nonlinearity and discusses in detail the problems of material micro- and macro-mechanics that are only slightly touched in existing books, e.g. stress diffusion in a unidirectional material with broken fibers, physical and statistical aspects of fiber strength, coupling effects in anisotropic and laminated materials, etc. The authors are designers of composite structures who were involved in practically all the main Soviet and then Russian projects in composite technology, and the permission of the Russian Composite Center - Central Institute of Special Machinery (CRISM) to use in this book the pictures of structures developed and fabricated in CRISM as part of the joint research and design project is much appreciated. Mechanics and Analysis of Composite Materials consists of eight chapters progressively covering all structural levels of composite materials from their components through elementary plies and layers to laminates. Covers specific features of material behaviour such as nonlinear elasticity, plasticity, creep, and structural nonlinearity. This work discusses the problems of material micro- and macro-mechanics such as stress diffusion in a unidirectional material with broken fibers, physical and statistical aspects of fiber strength, and more This volume presents the essence of research undertaken since the 1950s into the difficult problems of the stability of steel and steel-and-concrete composite structures and their components. It focuses not only on theory and computation but also on experimental verification Concerns with the topical problems of mechanics of advanced composite materials whose mechanical properties are controlled by high-strength and high-stiffness continuous fibers embedded in polymeric, metal, or ceramic matrix. Two significant earthquakes hit Italy in the last decades, procuring widespread damage and many victims: the Friuli earthquake of 1976 and the Irpinia earthquake of 1980.