Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Mechanics and Materials in Design (M2D2022)

M2D2022 is the ninth international gathering of a prestigious series of the Mechanics and Materials in Design conferences coordinated by the International Scientific Committee of Mechanics and Materials in Design. Due to the serious restrictions imposed by the pandemic COVID-19, which affected people in Europe and in the whole world, the M2D2022 conference
initially scheduled for June 2021 in Funchal/Portugal had to be postponed to 26-30 June 2022 in the same venue. This series of conferences are wholly devoted to advances in mechanics, materials, structural integrity and design. M2D2022 is jointly sponsored by the University of Porto, the University of Toronto and the Portuguese Society of Experimental Mechanics. The
conference attracted over 270 contributions, with 242 accepted submissions involving 689 authors from 34 different countries around the world.

The conference themes, which address novel and advanced topics on Mechanics and Materials in Design, focused on Theory, Experiments and Applications in Engineering and Biomechanics, including Composite and Advanced Materials, Computational Mechanics, Experimental Mechanics, Fatigue and Fracture Mechanics, Nanotechnologies and Nanomaterials, Tribology and Surface Engineering, Mechanical Design and Prototyping, Biomechanical Applications, Civil Engineering Applications, Energy and Thermo-Fluid Systems, and Industrial Engineering and Management, among other topics.

The conference also included an Open Forum on “Overcoming Unethical Publishing Practices”, where an expert panel with many years of collective and active researchers and educators addressed the obligations of publishers and authors with ethical practices in publishing their work.

We believe that the meeting offered our delegates a forum for the discussion and dissemination of their recent work in assessing the integrity, reliability and failure of engineering structures, components and systems, fostered research that integrates mechanics and materials in the design process, and promoted exchange of ideas and international co-operation among scientists and engineers in this important field of engineering.

We are indebted to the authors and special guests for their contributions. Each of the 242 approved papers offers an opportunity for thorough discussions with the authors and the scientific community. Particularly, we acknowledge the excellent contributions of the participants, their innovative ideas and research directions, their novel modeling and simulation
techniques, and their invaluable critical comments. We are also indebted to the outstanding keynote speakers who highlighted the conference themes with their contributions and covered the main topics of the conference. We also take this opportunity to thank the members of the International Scientific Committee and the reviewers for their time and helpful suggestions, the
symposia organizers for their efforts and valuable contributions to the success of the event, and the local organizing committee for an absolutely superb organization of the meeting in this magnificent city of Funchal. To all of you, we offer our gratitude.