The simulation of complex engineering problems often involves an interaction or coupling of individual phenomena, which are traditionally related by themselves to separate fields of applied mechanics. Typical examples of these so- called multifield problems are the thermo-mechanical analysis of solids with coupling between mechanical stress analysis and thermal heat transfer processes, the simulation of coupled deformation and fluid transport mechanisms in porous media, the prediction of mass transport and phase transition phenomena of mixtures, the analysis of sedimentation proces- ses based on an interaction of particle dynamics and viscous flow, the simulation of multibody systems and fluid-structure interactions based on solid-to-solid and solid-to-fluid contact mechanisms.

This book on the state of the art in "Multifield Problems" consists of selected articles based on a conference on this topic at the University of Stuttgart in 1999. The first two articles are contributions to the general modelling of multifield problems. S.S. Antman presents the important role of viscoelastic dissipation in the mathematical modelling of bifurcation analysis of nonlinear elasticity for large deformations. G.A. Maugin presents the basic theoretical foundations for the combination of three scales - the microscopic lattice of crystals, the mesoscopic thermomechanical model and the macroscopic con tinuum mechanics model for describing the propagation of phase transition fronts in terms of the Landau-Ginzburg theory and the modelling of nonlinear waves. The other contributions are associated with five main areas of multifield modelling such as two and multiphase flows, the mechanics of materials in terms of multiscaling, the interaction of solids and fluids, efficient solution methods of the discrete equations including adaptivity, and the modelling of contact and fracture."