Special Issue on EUROMECH 575

Abstract

EUROMECH – European Mechanics Society is a wellrespected international non-governmental organisation which organises, amongst other things ‘not-for-profit’, conferences or symposia. Unlike many scientific conferences, which have become over-large and with more speakers than listeners, the EUROMECH colloquia provide intimate, narrow (but deep) workshops where invited like-minded people sharing common research interests can profitably study selected topics. We were fortunate in being able to secure EUROMECH’s imprimatur for the Contact Mechanics symposium (EUROMECH Colloquium 575) organised by us at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca from 30 March to 2 April 2015. The strong support of the Scientific Committee of the colloquium in the advertisement of the event, which is very much acknowledged by us, led to a participation of 49 researchers with 43 presentations, in line with previous EUROMECH colloquia on contact mechanics. Despite EUROMECH’s name, the scheme permits the organisers to invite appropriate contributors from outside Europe and the opportunity was taken to do this. Although conference proceedings are not usually planned for EUROMECH colloquia, special issues of two of SAGE’s portfolio of engineering journals would publish the key papers, and the undersigned were nominated as guest editors. We were very impressed indeed with the quality of the work presented, which covered a very wide range of topics under the general umbrella of ‘contact mechanics’, from classical elasticity-based contact problems and problems formulated non-locally to questions of surface topography. Anticipating that the total number of papers of a good standard would exceed those which might be published as a single special issue we set out, from the start, to establish two complementary volumes, and allocated those papers relating primarily to stress analysis to The Journal of Strain Analysis for Engineering Design, and those with a more general scientific content to the Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science. We commend readers of this volume to look at the balance of papers in the complementary journal. Some of them have been written with a pedagogical content so that, for example, Argatov’s paper on the method of dimensionality reduction represents an interesting overview of this mathematical formalism, discussing also its controversial aspects and illustrating potential future applications of the method. It has been a pleasure to work with editorial colleagues at SAGE, and to thank those taking part in the symposium for their contributions, for participating, for the tremendously useful discussions which we witnessed taking place, and for helping, also, to referee papers. We are very pleased to be able to get these two special issues ‘out’ before the anniversary of the meeting, so that they represent a timely snapshot of the subject, and hope that they will prove attractive to general readers of mechanics papers as well as to those with a niche interest in the mechanics of contact. It is a testament to the speed with which most contributors made their work available, as well as to its quality.