This award provides support for the participation of ten US scientists in a joint US-Japan seminar on "Finite Element Analysis of Reinforced Concrete". The modelling of the behavior of reinforced concrete, particularly its dynamic behavior, is an extremely important field. Increased demands are being placed on certain special structures, such as nuclear power plant facilities and offshore drilling platforms, and hence there is a growing need for a more comprehensive analysis tool to aid in the design of such structures. The development of the finite element method has made it possible to analyze many different kinds of structures and to model their geometry more realistically, thus enabling researchers to gain new insights into the behavior of reinforced concrete structures. The research undertaken by US and Japanese scientists in this area is complementary, US researchers having made very valuable basic contributions to the advancement of finite element methods while Japanese researchers having been much more active in transferring those advances into practice. The seminar should therefore contribute both to the documentation of recent advances in each country, and to getting new techniques being developed into practice, particularly in the US. The seminar is to be held on June 3-6, 1991 at Columbia University, New York. The co-organizers are Professor Christian Meyer, Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University, and Professor Hiroshi Noguchi, Department of Architectural Engineering, Chiba University, Japan. The seminar will be divided into two parts, the first part concentrating upon the state of the art and the second on verification and application to practical engineering problems. Specific topics to be discussed at the seminar include (1) constitutive models; (2) fracture mechanics; (3) reinforced concrete models; (4) time-dependent behavior and behavior under dynamic loading; and (5) computational aspects. This will be the second seminar on this subject under the U.S.-Japan Cooperative Science Program, the first being held in 1985. It is expected that this seminar, as with the first seminar, will lead to increased exchanges of information and more extensive research collabor- ation.
