IUTAM Symposium on Mechanics and Reliability of Actuating Materials ; Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium held in Beijing, China, 1-3 September, 2004

The general assembly of IUTAM approved in August, 2002 at Cambridge University, UK, a proposal to hold an IUTAM symposium to summarize the relevant research findings. The main themes of the symposium are: (i) the constitutive relations of actuating materials that couple mechanical, electrical, thermal and magnetic properties, as well as incorporate phase transformation and domain switch; (ii) the physical mechanisms of deformation, damage, and fatigue crack growth of actuating materials; (iii) the development of failure-resilient approaches that base on the macro-, meso-, and micro-mechanics analyses; (iv) the investigation of microstructural evolution, stability of phase transformation, and size effects of ferroelectric ceramics, shape memory alloys, actuating polymers, and bio-actuating materials.