Selected, peer reviewed papers from the 53rd International Conference on Experimental Stress Analyses 2015 (EAN 2015), June 1-4, 2015, Český Krumlov, Czech Republic

Until now, information on the dynamic loading of structures has been widely scattered. No other book has examined the different types of loading in a comprehensive and systematic manner, and looked at their signficance in the design process. The book begins with a survey of the probabilistic background to all forms of loads, which is particularly important to dynamic loads, and then looks at the main types in turn: wind, earthquake, wave, blast and impact loading. The relevant code provisions (Eurocode and UBC American) are detailed and a number of examples are used to illustrate the principles. A final section covers the analysis for dynamic loading, drawing out the concepts underlying the treatment of all dynamic loads, and the corresponding modelling techniques. Throughout there is a focus on the modelling of structures, rather than on classical structural dynamics.

The field of structural optimization is still a relatively new field undergoing rapid changes in methods and focus. Until recently there was a severe imbalance between the enormous amount of literature on the subject, and the paucity of applications to practical design problems. This imbalance is being gradually redressed now. There is still no shortage of new publications, but there are also exciting applications of the methods of structural optimizations in the automotive, aerospace, civil engineering, machine design and other engineering fields. As a result of the growing pace of applications, research into structural optimization methods is increasingly driven by real-life problems. Most engineers who design structures employ complex general-purpose software packages for structural analysis. Often they do not have any access to the source the details of program, and even more frequently they have only scant knowledge of the structural analysis algorithms used in this software packages. Therefore the major challenge faced by researchers in structural optimization is to develop methods that are suitable for use with such software packages. Another major challenge is the high computational cost associated with the analysis of many complex real-life problems. In many cases the engineer who has the task of designing a structure cannot afford to analyze it more than a handful of times.