Mechanics for a New Millennium

The 20th International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mech- ics, ICTAM 2000, took place August 27 - September 2, 2000, in the c- ference facilities of the Chicago Marriott Downtown on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The Congress was invited by the US National Academy of Sciences on the recommendation of its National Comm- tee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. A consortium of university departments and programs acted as the local hosts. The undersigned served, respectively, as President and Secretary-General of the Congress. In this Proceedings volume we have attempted to capture the exci- ment of that memorable week. We have laid out the book so that it, roughly, tracks the events during the week of the Congress in much the order in which they occurred. We have given addresses and reports in context, although sometimes with embellishments to provide more data than could reasonably be presented orally. We have tried to reproduce essentials of the Opening and Closing ceremonies for the benefit of those who could not attend one or the other. We have tried to assemble an attractive volume that will have lasting value by adding an extensive name index and a briefer keyword index, and by exercising considerable care in the consistency of the layout of the full manuscripts. The international congresses of mechanics are major events of the field-we compare them to the Olympic Games in sports.

Proceedings of the 20th International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, held in Chicago, USA, 27 August-2 September 2000

New Perspectives on Crack and Fault Dynamics.- A Survey of and Evaluation Methodology for Fiber Composite Material Failure Theories.- Damage Mechanics of Metal-matrix Composites: Various Levels of Approach.- Metallic Foams: Structure, Properties, and Applications.- Linear Viscoelasticity of Concentrated Emulsions.- Aluminum: Approaching the New Millennium.- Electromagnetic Phenomena in Steel Continuous Casting.- Rail Vehicle Dynamics for the 21st Century.- Fundamentals of the Lateral Dynamics of Road Vehicles.- A Mechatronics Approach to Advanced Vehicle Control Design.- Mixing: Kinetics and Geometry.- Statistical Approach to the Mechanical Behavior of Granular Media.- Damage Analysis and Prevention in Composite Materials.- Electromagnetic Phenomena in Crystal Growth.- Software Tools: From Multibody System Analysis to Vehicle System Dynamics.- Granular Segregation in Collisional Shearing Flows.- Nonlinear Composites and Microstructure Evolution.- Hard Problems with Soft Materials: The Mechanics of Foams.- Magnetohydrodynamic Damped Buoyancy-driven Convection.- Adaptive, Nonlinear, and Learning Techniques for the Control of Vehicle Ride Dynamics.- Recent Advances in Turbulent Mixing.- Kinetic and Continuum Descriptions of Granular Flows.- Stationary Waves in Elasto-plastic and Visco-elasto-plastic Bodies.- Hierarchical Model- and Discretization-error Estimation of Elasto-plastic Structures.- Laminar Boundary-layer Theory: A 20th Century Paradox?.- Plasticity in the 21st Century.- Heart Simulation by an Immersed Boundary Method with Formal Second-order Accuracy and Reduced Numerical Viscosity.- Vortical Structure of Turbulence.- Probabilistic Methods in Earthquake Engineering.- Effective, Equivalent, and Apparent Properties of Heterogeneous Media.- Diffusion-controlled Combustion.- Nanomechanics and Micromechanics of Thin Films, Graded Coatings, and Mechanical/Nonmechanical Systems.- Optimum Design of Microelectromechanical Systems.- Local and Global Perspectives in Fluid Dynamics.- Closing Ceremony.