ICF President — Address to ICF Delegates
Dear Colleagues,
ICF sends the very warmest greetings to our global community of scientists, technologists, engineers and others working in the very diverse and wide-ranging field of structural integrity. ICF was founded in 1969 at ICF2 in Brighton, England, by Professor Takeo Yokobori with origins at ICF1 in Sendai, Japan in 1965. The International Congress on Fracture (ICF) is today the premier international body for the promotion of industrial, experimental & theoretical research, education and worldwide cooperation among scientists and engineers concerned with the mechanics and mechanisms of fracture, fatigue and structural integrity & safe design of materials, components, structures, and systems.
Over the decades since 1965, ICF has made considerable progress in providing an international forum for fostering and highlighting individual, industrial and national accomplishments in the overall field of fracture and structural integrity in a wide range of disciplines beyond the traditional arenas – from Biomedical to Geophysics, from nano to mega scales, and from the physical to the holistic and systems modelling. This conveys what ICF means by the general term “Structural Integrity”.
The ICF brand is very well established and ICF since May 2011 is known also as “ICF: The World Academy of Structural Integrity”. This leading world recognition for some fifty years has been mainly accomplished through the series of quadrennial conferences but also through a series of interquadrennial conferences. Sharing diversity in scientific, technical, educational, social as well as historical aspects, creating thereby synergistic effects as essentially an “Academy”.
ICF: The World Academy of Structural Integrity is delighted to have recently signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoU’s) with ASTM, CSTAM, DVM, IGF, GGF and others developing thereby a springboard for creative collaboration of ICF: WASI in many countries. We have established a series of Gold Medals and other major Awards for the encouragement and recognition of accomplishments in this field and created a community with a global reach in over 50 countries, ever expanding.
ICF13 will be a very special Quadrennial Conference in Beijing, China, in June 2013 as the First Quadrennial of this new era under the chairmanship of Professor Shou-Wen Yu– and we have plans well developed for the Quadrennial, Interquadrennial and other events over the next decade in many countries and in a range of specialist areas.
ICF: WASI is developing new strategies to meet the growing challenges for the next decade and beyond to provide enhanced safety, integrity and understandings as well as friendly co-operations for the common good globally in this critical field of Structural Integrity in its very widest sense. All documents, Minutes, Reports, Blogs are openly available as well as most importantly all the Proceedings and Research Papers from 1965 onwards, especially on our archival section of the new ICF: WASI website under development, and via the Quadrennial and Interquadrennial websites. We will welcome comprehensive dialogue and creative input from you through the ICF: WASI website.
Professor Alberto Carpinteri
ICF President 2009-2013
