The sixth annual meeting of the Fracture Mechanics series (FM2008) has been planned to be held at Zhejiang University of Technology during October of 2008. 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, Zhejiang University of Technology, Nanjing University of Technology, Zhejiang University and Zhenzhou University in addition to National Engineering Research Center of Pressure Vessels and Pipelines Safety Technology (General Machinery Research Institute).
In the past symposia, emphasis has been laid mainly on the theoretical basis of structural integrity. It is now an accepted realization that the conventional approach to evaluating structural integrity – rule-of-thumb guidelines, with excessive safety margins – no longer makes sense in today’s highly competitive business climate. The trend of integration of inspection, monitoring techniques and assessment approaches has been facilitated in recent years. The ability to monitor minute changes in plant or infrastructure condition with a high degree of confidence has led to continuous advances in structural integrity technology and risk based assessment.
Besides the strength and fracture theory of materials, the assessment of structural integrity may involve condition monitoring, intelligent computing, life cycle analysis, non-destructive evaluation, probabilistic methods for both scales of materials and structures. Structural integrity covers a wide range of industrial sectors and draws on many disciplines across the materials and engineering fields; it is an essential component of design and manufacture, as well as the subsequent life of the product. The multi- and inter- disciplinary nature of the structural integrity should thus be emphasized. It is thus hoped that FM2008 will integrate new developments from diverse areas of science and technology in relation to structural integrity. Besides the integration of theory and practice, science and technology, we wish to integrate more people of multidisciplinary background.

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