The conference was held at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, about 10km from the centre of Copenhagen; some accommodation was also available at the University. Co-sponsors included the IMEKO Technical Committee for Experimental Mechanics, the Japanese Society for Mechanical Engineers (JSME) and the USA Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM, previously the SESA). Major innovations introduced at this conference were the involvement of the JSME and the provision of a Young Researchers’ Scheme, funded by the Cowi Foundation, which made available financial support for young researchers to attend the conference. Technical visits were organised and non-technical events included a City Hall reception and a classical jazz concert. The author recalls with great pleasure the charms of Copenhagen. The conference was an unqualified success, thanks to the prodigious efforts of Professor Vagn Askegaard and his Organising Committee.
The delegates pack included five volumes of conference proceedings [9]! The authors of the 236 papers came from 28 different countries; there were 45 papers from Japan alone. Other major contributors were USA (23), Germany (22) and Denmark (20); there were also papers from China (9), the USSR (7), Taiwan (4), Korea (3) and Australia (2). The papers were presented in three parallel sessions in adjacent lecture halls in the conference building and, as in Amsterdam, all presentations were in English, the conference language. In all there were 35 separate sessions and three plenary sessions. This was a remarkable gathering.
In their diversity and range of coverage the papers offered “something for everybody”. There were three full sessions (17 papers) on Experimental Contact Mechanics, 4 sessions on Composite Systems, 4 on Structural Testing, 4 on Material Testing and 3 on Cementitious Materials and Concrete; these groups of papers might well be seen as mini-conferences in themselves. Grid Methods, Holography, Speckle and Laser Interferometry, and Photoelasticity covered 2 sessions each and 1˝ sessions (8 papers) were given to Thermoelastic Stress Analysis. Particularly impressive were the 4 sessions (28 papers) on New Developments in Residual Stress Measuring Techniques. Only 2 papers (both in the Contact Mechanics group) dealt with biomechanics. Finite element analysis appeared in a complementary role in 9 papers and the boundary integral approach was used in only one. Papers on the current status of experimental mechanics in (i) China and (ii) Japan in the closing Plenary Session attracted much attention.