Editorial

Abstract

This is the second Chinese Special Issue of FFEMS within 4 years. The first one was published in November 1988 (FFEMS Vol. 21, No. 11), which was coedited by two of us—WY and YH—as Guest Editors. A brief introduction to the history of fatigue and fracture investigations in China was depicted in the Editorial of that issue, which recalled interesting stories not only from the second half of 20th century but also records dated back to 2100 years ago. Since the publication of the first issue, the research of fatigue and fracture has been vibrant in China. Three remarkable events are worth mentioning: •The 7th International Fatigue Conference (FATIGUE'99) was successfully held in Beijing, China in June 1999 (Cochaired by X.R. Wu and Z.G. Wang). Some 432 papers were selected for presentation at the conference and inclusion in the Proceedings. More than 420 participants from 35 countries and regions attended the conference, of whom over a quarter were domestic participants. This was one of the largest gatherings in the relevant scientific and technical fields. •The 10th National Conference on Fatigue and Fracture was held in Guangzhou, China in December 2000, which was coorganized by six domestic academic societies from the community of mechanics and mechanical engineering to various branches of materials science, showing the interdisciplinary nature of fatigue and fracture research. In total, 130 papers were accepted for presentation and inclusion in the Proceedings. Most of the contributors and the participants were young researchers. •FFEMS started a China Editorial Team in March 2000, who are responsible for the reviewing of submissions from China. One of us—YH—serves as the Associate Editor for China for an initial period, communicating with the Sheffield Editorial Group chaired by Professor E.A. Patterson. Our performance indicates, in one way, the active role of Chinese Scientists and Engineers of this field in the world community. We very much appreciate the FFEMS Founding Editor, Professor K.J. Miller for his great efforts to form a China team closely involved in the journal. In June 2000, during his scientific visit to China, Professor J. Yates discussed with the China Editorial Team an initiative of this second Chinese Special Issue. We sent out invitations to principal investigators, in addition to a formal notice printed in a Chinese Journal of ‘Advances in Mechanics’. After peer review refereeing to the FFEMS standard, 10 papers were accepted in order to compose this issue. Seven of them are invited contributions and three of them are voluntary submissions. This Special Issue covers a broad range of recent fatigue and fracture research activities in China. The contents include: fatigue crack growth behaviour and life prediction of fibre reinforced metal laminates (by X.R. Wu et al.), interfacial damage of fibre reinforced composites under tensile cyclic loading (by Z.F. Shi et al.), stochastic characteristics for collective short fatigue cracks of steels (by Y. Hong et al.), small and long crack growth behaviour and fatigue life prediction for 9310 steel (by J.Z. Liu et al.), characteristics of Cr–Ni–Mo cast steel under isothermal fatigue and thermomechanical fatigue (by J.R. Fang et al.), corrosion fatigue investigation of high-strength aluminium alloy for the configuration with holes (by H. Shen et al.), analysis on coalescence process of planar microcracks for brittle materials (by T. Li et al.), microcrack behaviour in shape memory alloy (by Y.H. Lu et al.), T-stress effects on fracture behaviour of metal– ceramic interface by means of strain gradient analysis (by Y. Wei) and solution of Mode I crack problems for ferromagnetic material (by W. Liang et al.). It is obvious that a special issue only assembles a limited number of articles compared to the entire research activities in China. Nevertheless, we still hope that it may provide a picture of the current work being performed in China and hope to share this with the readers of this field around the world.