European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry – serie

June 20-25, 1987, ISI Torino

Numerical Analysis is an interdisciplinary topic which develops its strength only when viewed in close connection with applications. Nowadays, mechanical engineers having computer simulation as a daily engineering tool have to learn more and more techniques from that field. Mathematicians, on the other hand, are increasingly confronted with the need for developing special purpose methods and codes. This requires a broad interdisciplinary understanding and a sense for model-method interactions. With this monograph we give an introduction to selected topics of Numerical Anal­ ysis based on these facts. We dedicate our presentations to an interesting discipline in computational engineering: multibody dynamics. Though the basic ideas and methods apply to other engineering fields too, we emphasize on having one homo­ geneous class of applications. Both authors worked through many years in teams developing multibody codes. Interdisciplinary work also includes transferring ideas from one field to the other and a big amount of teaching -and that was the idea of this book. This book is intended for students of mathematics, engineering and computer sci­ ence, as well as for people already concerned with the solution of related topics in university and industry. After a short introduction to multibody systems and the mathematical formulation of the equations of motion, different numerical methods used to solve simulation tasks are presented. The presentation is supported by a simple model of a truck. This truck model will follow the reader from the title page to the appendix in various versions, specially adapted to the topics.

The European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) was founded, largely due to the driving energy of Michiel Hazewinkel on the 14th April, 1986 in Neustadt-Mussbach in West Germany. The founder signatories were A. Bensoussan (INRIA, Paris), A. Fasano (University of Florence), M. Hazewinkel (CWI, Amsterdam), M. Heilio (Lappeenranta University, Finland), F. Hodnett (University of Limerick, Ireland), H. Martens (Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim), S. McKee (University of Strathclyde, Scotland), H. NeURzert (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany), D. Sundstrom (The Swedish Institute of Applied Mathematics, Stockholm), A. Tayler (University of Oxford, England) and Hj. Wacker (University of Linz, Austria). The European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry is dedicated to: (a) promote the use of mathematical models in Industry (b) educate industrial mathematicians to meet the growing demand for such experts (c) operate on a European scale. ECMI is still a young organisation but its membership is growing fast.Although it has still to persuade more industrialists to join, ECMI certainly operates on a European scale and a flourishing postgraduate programme with student exchange has been underway for some time. It is perhaps fitting that the first open meeting of ECMI was held at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Glasgow is and was the industrial capital of Scotland and was, and arguably still is, Britain's second city after London; when this volume appears it will have rightly donned the mantle of the cultural capital of Europe.

The Fourth ECMI Conference on Industrial Mathematics took place at Strobl in Aus­ tria, May 29-June 2, 1989. The conference was devoted to the exchange of ideas, models and methods from various fields of industrial applications of mathematics. About 140 people from 21 countries attended the meeting. The aim was to bring together peo­ ple from industry and from university. In this respect the organizers were only partly successful!. The participance of about 20 people from industry shows that there is still much work to be done to increase the acceptance from this side. 72 speakers presented their results as invited or contributed lectures, or in the frame of 2 minisymposia. One minisymposium was organized by Heinz W. Engl and focused on steel processing, the other one, organized by Hansjorg Wacker, dealt with chemical engineering. These proceedings consist of 56 papers. The articles within each of the sections: Invited Lectures, Minisymposium Steel Processing, Minisymposium Chemical Engi­ neering, and Contributed Lectures are in alphabetical order of the first author. Exept for the contributions to the minisymposia, which clearly concentrate on the corre­ sponding topics, it is hard to find a reasonable classification of the papers . This, we believe, is typical for industrial mathematics and underlines the vast variety of fields where mathematics could be used to support problem solving. We would like to acknowlegde the valuable work of the referees of the articles who certainly helped to improve the quality of this volume.