Foreword
The
Brazilian Congress of Mechanical Engineering ?COBEM is the largest, most
traditional event in the field of Mechanical Sciences held in Brazil. This
biennial congress, sponsored by the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences
?ABCM, has a history of almost thirty years. Its goal is to gather professionals
from the academia and industrial area to discuss the main advances and
trends in the field. The exchange of technical information is achieved
by the oral presentation of technical papers, keynote talks, short courses,
round tables, exhibits, and informal exchange of ideas. The School of Mechanical
Engineering of the Universitdade Estadual de Campinas ?UNICAMP, was given
the honor and the responsibility of organizing the 15th COBEM. The Hotel
Monte Real Resort in Águas de Lindóia, São Paulo,
was chosen for the venue, and the dates defined as November 22 ?26, 1999.
Aiming
at favoring the creation and strengthening of research groups in Brazil,
as well as increasing the active participation during technical sessions,
the conference has been organized as a series of parallel symposia, each
gathering the technical sessions of a given broader subject area. In response
to our call for symposia, twenty symposia were originally proposed by the
scientific community. Thirty technical sessions have been kept in order
to have all the fields within Mechanical Engineering and related areas
covered. Later, after considering the papers actually submitted, we have
grouped some of the technical sessions into new symposia,
eventually
raising the number of symposia to twenty five and keeping only fourteen
stand- alone technical sessions.
Each
symposium of COBEM'99 has its own scientific committee. These committees
have defined the topics of interest, invited specialists to give plenary
talks, helped in announcing the conference, and have coordinated
the peer review process. We acknowledge the symposium committees, the review
coordinators of the stand- alone technical sessions, and the more than
eight hundred reviewers for the fine work they have done in reviewing the
1250 full papers submitted (out of 2300 abstracts). 1047 papers were accepted
for presentation, of which 1024 were approved in their final format for
publication in the conference proceedings.
As
suggested by the ABCM Council, paper presentations are all oral in COBEM'99.
Besides the technical paper presentations, the conference program includes
talks by internationally renowned experts, short courses, round tables,
and an Exhibition. Most of the interaction with our authors and other
participants has been done through the Internet, from the submission of
abstracts to the upload of the final text. Judging from the results, the
experience can be considered highly
successful,
and it is likely that, in future ABCM conferences, the peer review process,
which was still done in the traditional way in COBEM'99, will also be done
electronically.
The
stage of maturity reached by the Brazilian research community in Mechanical
Engineering, due to which the ABCM Journal was indexed by the Applied Mechanics
Reviews and by Engineering Information, Inc. is a sign of international
recognition, reflects itself in this COBEM in the form of a higher international
participation. This explains our effort to motivate authors to write and
present their papers in English.
The
keynote talks present state of the art and future trends in the various
fields of Mechanical Engineering and related areas, as well as their interfaces
with other fields of knowledge, seeking to establish the role of Engineering
in the context of current global concerns, such as the environment and
the impact of new technologies in our quality of life. The short courses
focus on subjects of great scientific and technological interest and are
taught by well known experts.
Like
in most large events, there were organization flaws in COBEM'99, for which
we apologize. We have done our best to minimize their effects on our invited
speakers, the symposium and technical session coordinators, authors and
other participants.
We
hope that COBEM'99 will remain in everyone's mind not only as a worthy
scientific event, but also as a significant cultural and human experience.
After all, our science and technology only make sense while they effectively
contribute to human development and to the improvement of the quality of
life on our planet.
Campinas,
November 1999
Organizing
Committee
