There is currently ever pressing need to provide a critical assessment of the current knowledge and indicate new challenges which are brought by the present time in fighting the man-made and natural hazards in transient analysis of structures. The latter concerns both the permanently fixed structures, such as those built to protect the people and/or sensitive storage material (e. g. military installations) or the special structures found in transportation systems (e. g. bridges, tunnels), and the moving structures (such as trains, plains, ships or cars). The present threat of the terrorist attacks or accidental explosions, the climate change which brings strong stormy winds or yet the destructive earthquake motion that occurs in previously inactive regions or brings about tsunamis, are a few examples of the kind of applications we seek to address in this work. The common ground for all the problems of this kind from the viewpoint of structural integrity, which also justifies putting them on the same basis and addressing them within the same context, is their sudden appearance, their transient nature and the need to evaluate the consequence for a high level of uncertainty in quantifying the cause. The problems of such diversity cannot be placed within a single traditional scientific discipline, but they call for the expertise in probability theory for quantifying the cause, interaction problems for better understanding the physical nature of the problems, as well as modeling and computational techniques for improving the representation of inelastic behavior mechanisms and providing the optimal design.

The original approach of the book concerns constructing the sufficiently complete framework for dealing with new challenges in man-made and natural hazards, which calls for the expertise from several traditional scientific disciplines

Inhalt
NUMERICAL MODELLING AND DYNAMICS OF COMPLEX STRUCTURES.- COMPUTATIONAL ISSUES IN THE SIMULATION OF BLAST AND IMPACT PROBLEMS: AN INDUSTRIAL PERSPECTIVE.- NONLINEAR TRANSIENT ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF COMPLEX ENGINEERING STRUCTURES FOR WORST CASE ACCIDENTS : EXPERIENCE FROM INDUSTRIAL AND MILITARY APPLICATIONS.- ON RELIABLE FINITE ELEMENT METHODS FOR EXTREME LOADING CONDITIONS.- PROBABILITY ASPECTS, DESIGN AND UNCERTAINTY.- QUANTIFYING UNCERTAINTY: MODERN COMPUTATIONAL REPRESENTATION OF PROBABILITY AND APPLICATIONS.- OPTIMUM PERFORMANCE-BASED RELIABILITY DESIGN OF STRUCTURES.- FIRE AND EXPLOSION INDUCED EXTREME LOADING CONDITIONS.- COMPUTATIONAL MODELLING OF SAFETY CRITICAL CONCRETE STRUCTURES AT ELEVATED TEMPERATURES.- THREE-DIMENSIONAL FE ANALYSIS OF HEADED STUD ANCHORS EXPOSED TO FIRE.- FLUID FLOW INDUCED EXTREME LOADING CONDITIONS.- DYNAMICS OF TSUNAMI WAVES.- MODELLING FLUID-INDUCED STRUCTURAL VIBRATIONS: REDUCING THE STRUCTURAL RISK FOR STORMY WINDS.- EARTHQUAKE INDUCED EXTREME LOADING CONDITIONS.- SEISMIC ASSESSMENT OF STRUCTURES BY A PRACTICE-ORIENTED METHOD.- REDUCING THE EARTHQUAKE INDUCED DAMAGE AND RISK IN MONUMENTAL STRUCTURES: EXPERIENCE AT ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE DE MONTREAL FOR LARGE CONCRETE DAMS SUPPORTED BY HYDRO-QUEBEC AND ALCAN.- EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH AT JRC-ELSA.- THE HISTORY OF EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS OF NUMERICAL METHODS AND COMPUTER PROGRAMS AT CSI BERKELEY.- STATISTICS ON EXTREME LOADING CONDITIONS FOR CROATIA.- SECURITY ISSUES IN CROTAIAN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY: BASES OF STATISTICAL DATA FOR QUANTIFYING EXTREME LOADING CONDITIONS.