Editorial

Abstract

The national conference in computational mechanics (Colloque national en calcul des structures) is organised every two years by the French Computational Structural Mechanics Association (CSMA). CSMA is affiliated to the “Association Française de Mécanique” (AFM), the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) and the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences. This regular and well-established event is the unique national meeting dedicated to this field. Since its inception in 1993, this Conference attracts an ever-increasing audience of junior and senior scientists, engineers and doctoral students. This 10th edition of the CSMA meeting, held on 9–13 May 2011 at the village of Giens (near Toulon, France), was organised by the LMGC laboratory (University of Montpellier, France). It gathered about 350 participants from all French research centres active in computational mechanics, and also about 25 participants from Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, UK, Spain, Switzerland, USA and a few other countries. Moreover, about 12% of the delegates came from industry. This special issue of the European Journal of Computational Mechanics gathers 21 papers selected from around 280 communications presented at the Conference. These contributions have been selected on the basis of quality, while also attempting to provide a general overview of current research in the field of computational mechanics. We warmly thank all the authors of the papers featured in this special issue.