Engineering Structures

This special issue of International Journal for Engineering Computations contains extended versions of the papers first presented by several invited speakers at the NATO-sponsored advanced research workshop on “Multi-physics and multi-scale computer models in non-linear analysis and optimal design of engineering structures under extreme conditions”, which was held in Bled, Slovenia, from 13 to 17 June 2004. It also features a couple of papers contributed by young researchers, who all made short presentations of their research works at that meeting. The collected papers seek to present the most recent research achievements on this currently very active research topic, and are therefore considered to be more suitable for a scientific journal than for a book-like presentation of keynote lectures, which was already published (Ibrahimbegovic and Brank, 2004). We are grateful to our colleague (and one of the keynote lecturers at the NATO-ARW in Bled) Professor D.R.J. Owen, the Editor of International Journal for Engineering Computations, for kindly providing us an opportunity to gather all those contributions in the present special issue. The kind of questions, which were raised herein and discussed thoroughly, are rather diverse, just as one can expect for the research field as rich and as active as the one of engineering structures. When attempting a rough classification of the published papers that could help to guide potential readers, we can recognize the contributions on nonlinear structural analysis, on optimal design of structures and microstructures, as well as on the structural parameters identification. With such a wide scope of papers’ contents, rather than looking for some “logical” order which was likely to be somewhat biased by our own personal preference, we choose to simply present the papers in alphabetical order of first authors’ names. Therefore, we start the issue with the paper by Allix and co-workers on devising a computational strategy for the identification of structural properties obtained from dynamic testing in the presence of corrupted measurements, followed by the paper by Brank and collaborators on dynamics of shell structures at finite rotations and implicit time-stepping schemes; next is the paper by Colliat et al. on development of constitutive model in either strain space of the space of stress resultants with applications to limit load analysis of brittle cellular structures under high temperatures, followed by the paper of Dominguez et al. on modeling the inelastic behavior of structures build of the most classical of all composite materials – reinforced concrete, where one can take into account all the potential failure modes related to either concrete, steel or bond-slip; the paper of Herve´ et al. extends further this line of developments by considering yet more elaborate model for inelastic constitutive behavior of concrete in high rate dynamics; the paper of