EMI 2015 International Conference Hong Kong

The Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) of ASCE was created on October 1, 2007, and it replaced the former ASCE Engineering Mechanics Division. In conjunction with the annual EMI conference held in North America in the summer, Professor Alex Cheng proposed that an additional EMI international conference could be organized annually in the winter. With the help of Dr. Amar Chaker, director of EMI, and Miss Verna Jameson, manager of EMI, this idea was seriously pursued and materialized into the present EMI 2015 Hong Kong conference. The EMI 2015 International Conference at Hong Kong was the first ever EMI international conference held outside North America, and it was held on the beautiful campus of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University from January 7–9, 2015. It also reflects EMI’s ambition to extend its activities to a global level. The continuous support and encouragement from previous EMI presidents (Alex Cheng, Roger Ghanem, and Roberto Ballarini), EMI Conference Committee (Muhammad R. Hajj), EMI director (Amar Chaker) and EMI manager (Verna Jameson) is most appreciated. Without the hard work of the International Scientific Committee, Executive Organizing Committee, Local Organizing Committee, symposium organizers, Program Committee, and reviewers, the conference would not have been possible.

The committee members are recognized herein:

Among the 120 participants, about 40 were students. It is a healthy sign that young successors in engineering mechanics are emerging at the international level and are taking active roles in academic exchanges. A group photograph taken on the first day is shown in Fig. 1. Among the registered presenters, participants came from 20 different countries or regions, including mainland China (29), Hong Kong, China (18), United States (15), Korea (8), Brazil (4), France (4), India (4), Thailand (3), Australia (3), Singapore (2), Lebanon (2), Taiwan, China (2), United Kingdom (2), Iran (1), Israel (1), Spain (1), Canada (1), Germany (1), and Switzerland (1). This list, however, does not include the EMI delegation from the United States and those keynote speakers. This demographic distribution made this truly an international event. There were a total of 103 technical presentations, plus 6 plenary keynote lectures. These presentations were allocated to 21 sessions, including 11 special symposia organized by ASCE’s international scientific committees and 10 regular sessions. The 11 special symposia included two sessions of “Geomaterials: Poromechanics and Failure” [organized by Teng-Fong Wong of Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), WaiChing Sun of Columbia University, and Jidong Zhao of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)], two sessions of “Analytical and Computational Modelling of Advanced Materials” (organized by Nimal Rajapakse of Simon Fraser University and Euclides Mesquita of University of Campinas), two session of “Structural Health Monitoring” [organized by Tommy Chan of Queensland University of Technology, S. S. Law of Beijing Jiaotong University, and Y. Q. Ni of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPolyU)], “Boundary-Element Method (BEM) and Meshless Method” (organized by Wen Chen of Hohai University, Zhenhan Yao of Tsinghua University, Jeng-Tzong Chen of National Taiwan Ocean University, Wenjin Ye of HKUST, and Alex Cheng of University of Mississippi), “Smart Structure in Hazard Mitigation” (organized by Tat Fu of University of New Hampshire), “Fracture Mechanics for Cementitious Materials” (organized by Christopher Leung of HKUST), “Soil-Structure Interactions” (organized by Andy Leung of HKPolyU), and “Forward and Inverse Problems in Elasticity and Applied Mechanics” (organized by John Brigham of University of Pittsburgh and Ron Pak of University of Colorado). The 10 regular sessions were on “Geomechanics,” “Biomechanics,” “Fluid Mechanics,” “Fracture and Damages” (two sessions), “Man-Made and Natural Hazards,” “Structural Mechanics,” “Earthquake Engineering,” “Wind Engineering,” and “Landslides and Flooding.”

The six international leading researchers who delivered plenary keynote lectures on various topics of engineering mechanics were

Figs. 2–7 show the plenary keynote speakers receiving a plaque from EMI President Professor Roberto Ballarini.

The travel expenses of the keynote speakers were sponsored financially and jointly by the University, faculty, and Department through the Faculty Conference Support Scheme. The conference organizers are most indebted to the continuous support from the former dean, Professor J. G. Teng, the current dean, Professor Y. L. Xu, and the provost and deputy president, Professor Philip Chan. The financial support from Rupert Leung through Hyder Consulting Limited is much appreciated. Nonfinancial sponsors of the conference include the International Association for Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE), International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS), ASCE Hong Kong Section, TC103 of International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE), and Hong Kong Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (HKSTAM). Among the numerous people helping this conference, a special thank goes to Dr. Andy Leung for serving as the conference secretary.

A postconference survey done independently by EMI shows that the event satisfaction index was 3.68 out of 4, which is the highest ever obtained for an EMI conference. The overall conference was rated as “excellent” by 68.2% of the respondents and “very good” by 31.8%.

With the kind agreement from the editor of the ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Professor Roberto Ballarini, it was decided that a collection of papers from the conference would be published as a special issue entitled “EMI 2015 International Conference Hong Kong.” After a few rounds of rigorous paper review cycles, a total of nine technical papers were accepted. These nine papers cover a wide range of problems in the area of unsaturated soil mechanics, geomechanics, contact problems, structural damages, dynamic elasticity, fiber-reinforced composites, and damage detections of structures. The methods employed by these papers include experiments, the use or development of elastic-plastic solution, coupled Fredholm–Volterra integral equations, and the use of numerical simulations via the finite-element method (FEM), BEM, and distinct-element method (DEM).

In particular, the paper by Zhai et al. is an experimental study on the electrical contact resistance on rough surface, with potential applications to diagnostic tribology. It was found that the electrical resistance depends on the applied stress as a power–law relation with its exponent closely related to the surface topography. Yu and Zhu developed a framework for structural damage prognosis for truss bridges based on higher statistical moments of structural response and fuzzy $c$-means clustering techniques, verified by laboratory tests on a six-bay bridge model. With its potential applications to the design of anchorage type of foundation, the paper by Mohtati et al. considered the horizontal harmonic vibrations of a rigid disk embedded in a transversely isotropic trimaterial elastic full-space through coupled Fredholm–Volterra integral equations. Investigating the micromechanics of partially saturated soils, Wang and Sun conducted DEM simulations to study the stress anisotropy in wetted granular materials as a function of stress path through the use of tensorial Bishop’s coefficient. Through the use of a superelement resulting from Guyan condensation technique, Liu et al. proposed a virtual distortion method to improve the updating of FEM models of large-scale bridges using static deformation. With the advancement of smart piezoelectric fiber-reinforced composites in mind, Sapsathiarn et al. considered a micromechanics model for the effective properties of piezoelectric fiber-reinforced composite materials with imperfect fiber-matrix interface bonding through the use of the BEM. Through the use of a new damage-sensitive feature, Yu and Lin considered a cloud-computing-based time-series analysis for structural damage detection. To study the sinkhole formation in the Dead Sea area, Linker and Klar used the Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer (BOTDR) (an optical measurement technique that provides distributed measurements of strain along tens of kilometers of conventional optical fibers, based on the Brillouin frequency shift of back-scattered light) to detect the formation of sinkholes through the development of a closed-form solution for the strain profile due to spherical voids in elastic–plastic soil. Finally, to fuse the data collected from different types of sensors, Lin and Xu proposed a two-stage covariance-based multisensing damage-detection method, through the use of FEM calculations.

Although the theme of the EMI 2015 International Conference Hong Kong was “Mechanics for Civil Engineers against Natural Hazards,” the conference’s technical program covered nearly all domains of engineering mechanics, and this is also reflected in the diversity of the nine accepted papers in this special issue. Finally, the conference team is most grateful to those anonymous reviewers who helped to review the submitted papers and offered their generous suggestions.