This Special Issue contains some of the papers presented at MIT to pay tribute to Professor Jerry Connor of its Civil Engineering Department on the occasion of his retirement after 60 years there. The event was fully reported in Volume 2, Number 4 of this Journal. The occasion brought together a number of academics and professionals who were profoundly influenced by Jerry’s knowledge and personality, whose support was decisive for starting their careers off on the right track, my own included. In my case, my association with Jerry helped me to clarify and extend the finite element concepts and integral equations mathematical tools that gave rise to the Boundary Element Method.

Professor Herbert Einstein, one of his colleagues at MIT, commented on Jerry’s ability to always be ahead of what needs to be solved. He introduced a series of major innovations in research and teaching of Civil Engineering, always keeping in mind the professional relevance of whatever he was teaching. Herbert was grateful to Jerry for his help in reaching tenure at MIT and for his many illuminating discussions. He concluded by describing his contribution in engineering. Jerry, Herbert said, is an engineer’s engineer! Professor Jose Roesset, remembers Jerry’s teaching as a breath of fresh air, managing to simplify the most difficult of problems to their fundamentals and applying simple concepts. Jerry, Jose said, is foremost a teacher and a true scholar. Jerry’s influence on Ove Gudmestad, was decisive in shaping his career in the offshore oil industry. Some topics of Ove’s research, including the development of arctic engineering and earthquake effects, arose out of his collaboration with Jerry. More importantly perhaps was the fact that Jerry impressed on Ove the need to carry out research work thoroughly and as a team member. John Niedzwecki, now Professor at Texas A&M, related how he started work on artificial intelligence under Jerry’s guidance. This resulted in John’s innovative research on offshore structures instrumentation tools.

Petros Komodromos, now at the University of Cyprus, expressed his appreciation to Jerry for his support during his PhD thesis. He is author of many papers on the Response of Seismically isolated Buildings, a topic he has fully developed in several publications, including a book.

Mauricio Sarrazin, Head of his own Consulting firm and Professor at the University of Chile, referred also to the importance of Jerry in the development of his own career particularly on the solution of non linear equilibrium problems. Professor Simon Laflamme of Iowa State University on coming to MIT, was impressed by the way Jerry interacted with his students, particularly those in the Master of Engineering programme which he created and which, every year, included a trip abroad at the end to visit outstanding engineering works. Jerry’s input has had a great impact on several generations of researchers, changing their lives, including my own. A secret of his success has been his ability to listen and respect the opinions of all his colleagues and students. Jerry maintained that students should be treated as equals, instilling in them the confidence that they would require in their future professional lives, just one of the many reasons why so many of us feel indebted to Jerry.

The theory of morphological indicators (MI) provides user-friendly tools guiding the structural designer towards low volume consuming solutions during the exploration and comparison of different structural types. Since a first doctoral thesis published in 1999, a decade of research has refined MI into a bench­marked structural optimisation method for conceptual design. This article surveys the milestones that lead to today’s method and contains the published references that contributed to the major evolutions of MI. The article also refers to the work of other researchers in structural and architectural engineer­ing, this time in the quest of optimisation of structures through a more sustainable design, offering the possibility of re-use and recombination of structural components. This technique, called 4D design methodology, was based on a research proposal by Hendrickx and Van Walleghem, which was further developed at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Long span bridges and high rise buildings are two types of structures that have always arisen the atten­tion of engineers and architects. The former are appropriate for creating crossings over wide rivers or estuaries in a sort of recreation of the geography of our planet. The latter are many times used to be a symbol of the wealthy of the cities where they are erected.

Construction of both typologies has experienced a dramatic activity since the last decades of the past century in many countries located in different continents such as Europe, Asia or America, and such tendency has even increased in recent years, and several challenging proposals have also been proposed for the years to come.

This article starts with a brief description of the capabilities and advantages of long span bridges and tall buildings. Afterwards, a description of the main realizations of suspension and cable-stayed bridges already existing all around the world is presented mentioning their main characteristics and fea­tures. Additionally, information on bridge projects that could take place in a near future are mentioned. Then, a similar treatment is carried out for the vast collection of signature buildings erected in the last decades. It will be observed that in addition to the new tall structures in already very cosmopolitan cit­ies, many of them have been built in other places and have transformed radically the skyline of cities in China, Singapore, Korea or the Arabic Gulf countries, to name a few.

Fabrication of silicon carbide fibres reinforced silicon carbide composite (SiC/SiC) by chemical vapour infiltration (CVI) process was investigated in this research with the help of both simulation and experimental set-up. CVI of silicon carbide preform was carried out through the pyrolysis of methyltrichlorosilane (MTS) over a broad temperature range at atmospheric pressure. The overall aim was the morphological description of the matrix (co-deposition of Si, SiC and C) during pyrolysis of MTS by CVI process and its state-of-the-art numerical calculation. Phase-field model was developed and deployed to predict the evolution of the microstructures and to describe the influence of the infiltration conditions on the properties of the composite during CVI process in conjunction with the implication of finite element method. Both mass transport and fluid motion in gas phase were considered. Experimental results exhibit three deposition regimes at different temperature ranges as predicted by the numerical simulation results. This also implies different deposition kinetics involved as investigated in the present research. The great difference of the steady-state deposition rate exceeding three orders of magnitude was explained in terms of a multiple steady-state surface reaction model of co-deposition of SiC, Si and C. Corresponding gas-phase compositions, over the temperature region covered in the present experiments, were calculated with a detailed pyrolysis reaction mechanism of MTS.

This article reviews numerical modeling methods for certain electromagnetic compatibility topics in wind turbine (WT) analysis. Some scenarios in which WTs behave as electromagnetic interference sources and victims, respectively, are considered. The formulation is carried out in the frequency domain and it is based on the related Electric Field Integral Equation type. The numerical solution of the governing equations is obtained by some variants of the boundary element method. The computational examples are related to the transient response of WTs struck by lightning and to the disturbances of radio system operation caused by WTs. The analysis of WT impact to the radar system operation is carried out by solving the corresponding integral equations via the boundary integral equation method combined with physical optics.

The complex variable boundary element method or CVBEM is a numerical technique that can provide solutions to potential value problems in two or more dimensions by the use of an approximation function that is derived from the Cauchy integral equation in complex analysis. Given the potential values (i.e. a Dirichlet problem) along the boundary, the typical problem is to use the potential function to solve the governing Laplace equation. In this approach, it is not necessary to know the streamline values on the boundary. The modeling approach can be extended to problems where the streamline function is needed because there are known streamline values along the problem boundary (i.e. a mixed boundary value problem). Two common problems that have such conditions are insulation on a boundary and fluid flow around a solid obstacle. In this paper, five advances in the CVBEM are made with respect to the modeling of the mixed boundary value problem; namely (1) the use of Mathematica and Matlab in tandem to calculate and plot the flow net of a boundary value problem. (2) The magnitude of the size of the problem domain is extended. (3) The modeling results include direct computation and development of a flow net. (4) The graphical displays of the total flownet are developed simultaneously. And (5) the nodal point location as an additional degree of freedom in the CVBEM modeling approach is extended to mixed boundaries. A demonstration problem of fluid flow is included to illustrate the flownet development capability.