This volume presents the Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium on "Theoretical and Numerical Methods in Continuum Mechanics of Porous Materials" held at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, September 5-10, 1999. It contains 57 articles showing the state-of-the-art in the field of porous media research. The goal of the symposium was to bring together the scientific results of leading experts in the field. Thus, the volume provides the whole range of modelling empty, partially saturated and fully saturated porous materials, such as soil, concrete, sinter materials, metallic and polymeric foams, glacier and rock ice, living tissues, etc. In addition to the macroscopic continuum mechanical view of porous materials and the numerical computations of fully coupled solid-fluid problems, micro-to-macro homogenization strategies are presented and material parameters are compared to experimental data to optimize the geometrically linear and finite approaches for the description of the elastic, viscous and plastic properties of the solid matrix and the viscous properties of the pore-fluids.In addition to these general topics, several contributions are included concerning the fields of wave propagation, localization phenomena, Biot's approach to porous media, fracture and damage, swelling, drying and shrinkage, as well as composite materials. Like a state-of-the-art volume, this work allows researchers and engineers to get an excellent overview of the theoretical and numerical description of porous materials, including various applications to practical engineering problems.
