SPECIAL ISSUE Computational Methods in Composite Materials and Structures

Abstract

Composite materials have become a fundamental component of the manufacturing processes for engineering structures, systems and mechanisms because of their extreme ranges of strength and flexibility. It provides opportunities to design specific and optimal properties that were not available for traditional homogeneous engineering materials. Composites are everywhere from applications in civil and environmental engineering till the very subtle and rare parts and elements in aeronautical and biotechnological applications. This enormous progress, comparable to the technological revolution of the eighteen century, was possible thanks to the academic and industrial research in development, design, optimization and modeling of multi-component materials. A larger part of this development was possible due to the tremendous progress of computer methods and modeling techniques including Finite Element, numerical methods as well as advances in homogenization methods. Research directions in the area of composite materials often follow preceding discoveries and new ideas in classical mechanics, physics, and chemistry of solids. One of the most eminent and recent examples is the analysis of nano-composites, which reflects an impact of academic and industrial research in nanosciences noticed a few years before. The second source of composites research expansion is the variety of the autonomous problems still arising in the case of multi-component materials like the interface phenomena, which do not take place in homogeneous materials. Another source of innovation lies in the development of computational methods by themselves; like progress in stochastic numerical analysis of composite’s durability and reliability. Considering a number of new directions, ideas and methods, we summarize the current progress in computational analysis of composites to identify important engineering problems to be modeled and solved in this area and to provide an overview of new mathematical methods that can be implemented into existing computer codes. This issue, containing the papers presented at the Eight World Congress of Computational Mechanics (WCCM 8) and Fifth European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering (ECCOMAS 2008) held in July of 2008 at Venice in Italy, has been compiled for this purpose. This issue contains selected papers, which according to the opinions of all reviewers are the representative of current research in composites science and engineering. The leading idea in all these works is to answer the fundamental question – how is the overall composite behavior governed by smaller scales phenomena?