Many conferences include discussions of damage, cracking and fracture of concrete, but mostly outside the context of fracture mechanics. Other conferences cover the subject of fracture mechanics, but rarely focused on its application to concrete and concrete structures. IA-FraMCoS was founded to help fill this gap.
Concrete is an archetypical quasibrittle material. It consists of brittle constituents and is characterized by a non-negligible material characteristic length, which endows the material with a behavior that is transitional between the stress-strain relations for distributed damage at small scales and linear elastic fracture mechanics at large scales. This transitional behavior poses difficult challenges for theoretical, experimental and computational research.
Originally, IA-FraMCoS only activity was the triennial conference series with focus on concrete. Presently, it seeks to expand its activities to cover not only fundamental developments in concrete but also promotion of fracture-based approaches in engineering practice.
This will be accomplished through the perennial conferences and endorsements of high quality scientific research.
Previous FraMCoS conferences: 2016 Berkeley (USA), 2013 Toledo (Spain), 2010 Jeju (Korea), 2007 Catania (Italy), 2004 Vail (USA), 2001 Cachan (France), 1998 Gifu (Japan), 1995 Zürich (Switzerland), 1992 Breckenridge (USA)
Conference Topics
FraMCoS conferences serve as a forum of exchange of ideas and confrontation of practices. FraMCoS X welcomes paper contributions within, or spanning, the following themes:
A : Theoretical fracture mechanics
B : Experimental methodologies
C : Computational modeling
D : Durability/coupled problems
E : Novel cementitious and/or other quasi-brittle materials
F : Structural concrete applications.
In addition to the above topics, mini-symposia focusing on important current issues of fracture of concrete and concrete structures will be organized :
While the intention is for contributions to be relevant to the subject area of fracture mechanics of concrete and concrete structures, other related topics of interest to conference participants will be considered.
