This accessible text presents a unified approach of treating the microstructure and effective properties of heterogeneous media. Part I deals with the quantitative characterization of the microstructure of heterogeneous via theoretical methods; Part II treats a wide variety of effective properties of heterogeneous materials and how they are linked to the microstructure, accomplished by using rigorous methods.

Common engineering materials reach in many demanding applications such as automotive or aerospace their limits and new developments are required to ful ll increasing demands on performance and characteristics. The properties of ma- rials can be increased for example by combining different materials to achieve better properties than a single constituent or by shaping the material or c- stituents in a speci c structure. Many of these new materials reveal a much more complex behavior than traditional engineering materials due to their advanced str- ture or composition. Furthermore, the classical applications of many engineering materials are extended to new ranges of applications and to more demanding en- ronmental conditions such as elevated temperatures. All these tendencies require in addition to the synthesis of new materials, proper methods for their m- ufacturing and extensive programs for their characterization. In many elds of application, the development of new methods and processes must be acc- plished by accurate and reliable modeling and simulation techniques. Only the interaction between these new developments with regards to manufacturing, m- eling, characterization, further processing and monitoring of materials will allow to meet all demands and to introduce these developments in safety-relevant applications. The 3rd International Conference on Advanced Computational Engineering and Experimenting, ACE-X 2009, was held in Rome, Italy, from 22 to 23 June 2009 with a strong focus on the above mentioned developments.

The main features of high-temperature superconductors (HTSC) that define their properties are intrinsic brittleness of oxide cuprates, the layered anisotropic structure and the supershort coherence length. Taking into account these features, this treatise presents research into HTSC microstructure and properties, and also explores the possibilities of optimization of the preparation techniques and superconducting compositions. The "composition-technique-experiment-theory-model," employed here, assumes considerable HTSC defectiveness and structure heterogeneity and helps to draw a comprehensive picture of modern representations of the microstructure, strength and the related structure-sensitive properties of the materials considered. Special attention is devoted to the Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O and Y-Ba-Cu-O families, which currently offer the most promising applications. Including a great number of illustrations and references, this monograph addresses students, post-graduate students and specialists, taking part in the development, preparation and research of new materials. The new edition had been updated intensively, especially experimental investigations and modeling conductive and elastic properties of HTC superconductors have been added.

This book presents the micromechanics of random structure heterogeneous materials, a multidisciplinary research area that has experienced a revolutionary renascence at the overlap of various branches of materials science, mechanical engineering, applied mathematics, technical physics, geophysics, and biology. It demonstrates intriguing successes of unified rigorous theoretical methods of applied mathematics and statistical physics in material science of microheterogeneous media. The prediction of the behaviour of heterogeneous materials by the use of properties of constituents and their microstructure is a central problem of micromechanics. This book is the first in micromechanics where a successful effort of systematic and fundamental research of the microstructure of the wide class of heterogeneous materials of natural and synthetic nature is attempted. The uniqueness of the book lies in its development and expressive representation of statistical methods quantitatively describing random structures which are at most adopted for the forthcoming evaluation of a wide variety of macroscopic transport, electromagnetic, strength, and elastoplastic properties of heterogeneous materials.

This book reviews recent theoretical, computational and experimental developments in mechanics of random and multiscale solid materials. The aim is to provide tools for better understanding and prediction of the effects of stochastic (non-periodic) microstructures on materials’ mesoscopic and macroscopic properties. Particular topics involve a review of experimental techniques for the microstructure description, a survey of key methods of probability theory applied to the description and representation of microstructures by random modes, static and dynamic elasticity and non-linear problems in random media via variational principles, stochastic wave propagation, Monte Carlo simulation of random continuous and discrete media, fracture statistics models, and computational micromechanics.

This book presents new research directions in a very new field which happens to be an old field as well.