The Department of Applied Mechanics of the Royal Institution of Engineers in the Netherlands (Koninklijk Instituut van Ingenieurs) organised on April 2-4, 1990 the first National Applied Mechanics Congress about the theme: "Integration of Theory and Applications in Applied Mechanics" The idea behind this initiative was to bring together the Applied Mechanics communities in The Netherlands and Belgium and to create an environment in which new developments in the field could be discussed and in which connections to other disciplines could be established. Among an extensive list of possible subjects the following were selected as congress topics: - non-linear material behaviour, - chaos, - mechatronics, - liquid-solid interactions, - mathematics and applied mechanics, - integration of Applied Mechanics and other disciplines. Applied Mechanics comprises both solid mechanics and fluid mechanics. These can be subdivided further into: rheology, plasticity, theory of plates and shells, theory of elasticity, multibody dynamics, dynamics of continuous media, stability of the elastic equilibrium, etc. Applied Mechanics is of tremendous practical significance and it proves its value almost daily in applications such as the calculation of the strength and stiffness of constructions, like e. g.
