Introduction

SUSI 2012 is the 12th international conference in the series on ‘Structures Under Shock and Impact’. The main objective of the meeting is to attract participants with as wide a spectrum of expertise as possible, working across a broad range of structural problems throughout industry and academia which are subjected to impact and blast loadings.

The shock and impact behaviour of structures is a challenging area, not only because of its obvious time-dependent aspects, but also because of the difficulties in specifying the external dynamic loading characteristics and in obtaining the full dynamic properties of materials. Thus it is important to recognise and fully utilise the contributions and understanding emerging from the theoretical, numerical and experimental studies, as well as investigations into the material properties under dynamic loading conditions.

The shock and impact behaviour of structures is a very active field and the range of topics is ever expanding. The list of topics shown only gives an idea of the wide range of applications to be discussed during the meeting. Contributions in topics not listed are also welcome if they fall within the scope of the SUSI conference.

SUSI 2010 follows on from the other successful meetings in this series, which first started in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (1989) and continued in Portsmouth, UK (1992); Madrid, Spain (1994); Udine, Italy (1996); Thessaloniki, Greece (1998); Cambridge, UK (2000); Montreal (2002); Crete (2004); the New Forest, UK (2006); the Algarve, Portugal (2008) and Tallinn, Estonia (2010).