This book gives an overview of the research projects within the SFB 404 "Mehrfeldprobleme in der Kontinuumsmechanik". The book is for researchers and graduate students in applied mechanics and civil engineering.

Studies of vibro-impact dynamics falls into three main categories: modeling, mapping and applications. This text covers the latest in those studies plus selected deterministic and stochastic applications. It includes a bibliography exceeding 1,100 references.

The simulation of complex engineering problems often involves an interaction or coupling of individual phenomena, which are traditionally related by themselves to separate fields of applied mechanics. Typical examples of these so-called multifield problems are the thermo-mechanical analysis of solids with coupling between mechanical stress analysis and thermal heat transfer processes, the simulation of coupled deformation and fluid transport mechanisms in porous media, the prediction of mass transprot and phase transition phenomena of mixtures, the analysis of sedimentation processes based on an interaction of particle dynamics and viscous flow, the simulation of multibody systems and fluid-structure interactions based on solid-to-solid and solid-to-fluid contact mechanisms.

While the stability theory for systems with bilateral constraints is a well-established field, this monograph represents a systematic study of mechanical systems with unilateral constraints, such as unilateral contact, impact and friction. Such unilateral constraints give rise to non-smooth dynamical models for which stability theory is developed in this work. The book will be of interest to those working in the field of non-smooth mechanics and dynamics.

This book investigates the behaviour of weak solutions to the elliptic transmisssion problem in a neighborhood of boundary singularities: angular and conic points or edges, considering this problem both for linear and quasi-linear equations.

The book is devoted to investigation of a series of problems of convective heat and mass transfer in rotating-disk systems. Such systems are widespread in scienti?c and engineering applications. As examples from the practical area, one can mention gas turbine and computer engineering, disk brakes of automobiles, rotating-disk air cleaners, systems of microclimate, extractors, dispensers of liquids, evaporators, c- cular saws, medical equipment, food process engineering, etc. Among the scienti?c applications, it is necessary to point out rotating-disk electrodes used for experim- tal determination of the diffusion coef?cient in electrolytes. The system consisting of a ?xed disk and a rotating cone that touches the disk by its vertex is widely used for measurement of the viscosity coef?cient of liquids. For time being, large volume of experimental and computational data on par- eters of ?uid ?ow, heat and mass transfer in different types of rotating-disk systems have been accumulated, and different theoretical approaches to their simulation have been developed. This obviously causes a need of systematization and generalization of these data in a book form.

Many historically and artistically important masonry buildings of the world’s architecturalheritageareindireneedofmaintenanceandrestoration.Inorder tooptimizesuchoperationsintermsofcost-e?ectiveness,architecturalimpact andstatice?ectiveness,accuratemodelsofthestructuralbehaviorofmasonry constructions are invaluable. The ultimate aim of such modeling is to obtain important information, such as the stress ?eld, and to estimate the extent of cracking and its evolution when the structure is subjected to variations in both boundary and loading conditions. Although masonry has been used in building for centuries, it is only - centlythatconstitutivemodelsandcalculationtechniqueshavebeenavailable that enable realistic description of the static behavior of structures made of this heterogeneous material whose response to tension is fundamentally d- ferent from that to compression. Important insights on the mechanical behavior of masonry arches and vaults come from as far back as Leonardo [10], Hooke [58], Poleni [92] and many other authors (see [47], [9] and [10] for detailed references). Castigliano, in his famous paper on the Mosca bridge [23], and Signorini, in his studies on masonry beams [97], [98], showed both the possibility and necessity of taking into account the weak tensile strength of masonry material.

Contents Recent advancements in the performance of industrial products and structures are quite intense. Consequently, mechanical design of high accuracy is necessary to enhance their mechanical performance, strength and durability. The basis for their mechanical design can be provided through elastoplastic deformation analyses. For that reason, industrial engineers in the fields of mechanical, civil, architec- ral, aerospace engineering, etc. must learn pertinent knowledge relevant to elas- plasticity. Numerous books about elastoplasticity have been published since “Mathema- cal Theory of Plasticity”, the notable book of R. Hill (1950), was written in the middle of the last century. That and similar books mainly address conventional plasticity models on the premise that the interior of a yield surface is an elastic domain. However, conventional plasticity models are applicable to the prediction of monotonic loading behavior, but are inapplicable to prediction of deformation behavior of machinery subjected to cyclic loading and civil or architectural str- tures subjected to earthquakes. Elastoplasticity has developed to predict defor- tion behavior under cyclic loading and non-proportional loading and to describe nonlocal, finite and rate-dependent deformation behavior.

This Festschrift is a collection of articles contributed by colleagues, collaborators and past students to honor Professor John T. Katsikadelis on the occasion of his 70 years. Professor Katsikadelis, now an emeritus professor at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece, is one of the BEM pioneers who started his research in this field with his PhD thesis at the Polytechnic Institute of New York in the 1970s and continued it to date.The book comprises 26 contributions by more than 50 leading researchers in Boundary Element Methods (BEM) and other Mesh Reduction Methods (MRM). All contributors are well-known scientists from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. The volume is essentially a collection of both original and review articles covering a variety of research topics in the areas of solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, potential theory, composite materials, fracture mechanics, damage mechanics, plasticity, heat transfer, dynamics and vibrations and soil-structure interaction. Invaluable to scientists, engineers and other professionals interested in the latest developments of the boundary integral equation methods, it addresses the needs of the BEM computational mechanics research community.The book is written for: researchers in academia and industry and graduate students focusing on solid and fluid mechanics as used in civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Domain decomposition is an active, interdisciplinary research field concerned with the development, analysis, and implementation of coupling and decoupling strategies in mathematical and computational models. This volume contains selected papers presented at the 17th International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods in Science and Engineering. It presents the newest domain decomposition techniques and examines their use in the modeling and simulation of complex problems.