The
seventh annual meeting of the Fracture Mechanics series (FM2009)
has been planned to be held at Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU)
during October 16-20 of 2009. This series started in 2003 and
was organized by a consortium of academic and industrial institutions.
They include the East China University of Science and Technology,
Southwest Jiaotong University, Nanjing University of Technology,
Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University of Technology, Zhengzhou
University, Changsha University of Science and Technology, and
Shandong University, in addition to National Technology Research
Center of Safety Engineering for Pressure Vessels and Pipelines
(Hefei General Machinery Research Institute).
As
the globe is evolving into a more complex world, the structural
integrity technology should adapt to the challenges of complexity
of the environments and the machines themselves. An examination
of the transferability and applicability of the current mechanics
approaches or theories to structural integrity assessment should
be imperative. Any new model or approach must successfully transit
two sequential ¡°filters¡± between research initiation and application,
a technical filter (does it work?) and a technological filter
(does it make sense in the ¡°real world¡±?). Our mechanics research
community is normally not sufficiently knowledgeable concerning
the metrics of the technological filter and therefore ¡°non (application)
useful¡± research is conducted in many cases and in others the
research is not carried far enough to allow practical applications.
The objective of this symposium is hence to bring together the
mechanics research community and the application community to
identify the transferability and applicability of current mechanics
approaches for structural integrity assessment. Besides the traditional
fracture mechanics topics, contributions bridging the gap between
the mechanics approaches and code practices are highly welcome.
