Editorial foreword: Special issue ICEAF Ⅲ 3rd International Conference of Engineering Against Failure

摘要

Prevention of unexpected failures represents a non-negotiable design objective in any engineering applications. Nevertheless, failures of machines, components, and structures could not be fully avoided, some of them being catastrophic and involving the loss of human lives. The unexpected failures of tankers and cargo ships that were built in the USA in the frame of the emergency shipbuilding program during the Second World War, a series of crashes of the Comet airplanes during the 50s and 60s, and the Aloha accident in 1988, are some of these catastrophic and also spectacular failures that gave rise to re-thinking engineering against failure and the introduction of new scientific branches, such as Fracture Mechanics, and new design concepts, such as the Damage Tolerance Design Concept.