In this special issue of IPSE is a collection of selected extended manuscripts from the 7th International Conference on Inverse Problems in Engineering (ICIPE 2011) held at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, FL, USA, during 4–6 May, 2011. This is the 24th in the series of national and international meetings on Inverse Problems that were initiated at Michigan State University in 1988. Papers were solicited from graduate students, faculty and scientists both nationally and internationally. Indeed, the international scientific committee and conference participants are from a variety of countries, including the USA, France, Poland, England, Russia, Japan, Brazil, among others. The topics covered in the conference are broad spanning from applications to thermal sciences, including estimation of thermal properties, estimation of heat flux functions, determination of thermocouple error, and other inverse heat transfer problems, to mechanics, including such topics as damage identification and NDE, to medical application such as LVAD controller design. The primary objective of the ICIPE 2011 conference was to bring together researchers and graduate students in sciences and engineering to present recent research results in inverse problems and to provide a forum in which to discuss their findings and to foster interdisciplinary interaction. A noteworthy feature of all ICIPE meetings is the balanced focus on theory and applications, as well as the combination of both.
The meeting consisted of three days of technical presentations enriched by a workshop on Parameter Estimation and the Inverse Heat Conduction Problems (IHCP) delivered over the course of two days by Professor James Beck, Professor Robert McMasters and Professor Kirk Dolan. The workshop was open to all conference attendees, faculty and graduate students. The financial support from the United States National Science Foundation (NSF Grant number 1134897), which made possible the organization and delivery of the workshop and the attendance of selected graduate students, is gratefully acknowledged. The PowerPoint slide presentation of the workshop and the conference proceedings are available for download from the conference website at: www.icipe2011.org.
The follow-up international conference in this series will be organized in Poland in 2014 by Professor Ireneusz A. Szczygiel of the Silesian University of Technology.
Alain Kassab
Eduardo Divo
University of Central Florida, USA
Special Issue Guest Editors