Advanced materials and structures IV : selected, peer reviewed papers from the Fourth International Conference on Advanced Materials and Structures, October 27-28, 2011, Timișoara, Romania

Summary: The present volume contains the papers presented at the international conference on Advanced Materials and Structures - AMS 2011, held in Timisoara, Romania, in 2011. The conference aimed to cover the broad domain of advanced materials in all of its important aspects: technology of fabrication, property characterization, advanced applications, investigation and mathematical modelling. The Department of Materials and Manufacturing Engineering at the Politehnica University of Timisoara hosted the conference, which considered advanced materials from such perspectives as the technology of fabrication, characterizing properties, advanced applications, and mathematical modeling. Some seventy presented and poster papers discuss such aspects as experimental tests on fine nitinol wires used in medical applications, failure analysis of some retrieved orthopedic implants based on materials characterization, size effect of fracture toughness of rigid polyurethane foams, increasing the quality of ingots cast in vacuum, and scanning strategies for aluminum and plastic parts.