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


COBEM99 | Organizing Committee | Keynotes | Technical  Sessions | Author | Symposia and special sessions | Referees
Work  Titles | Venue