No. 24. Proceedings of the 6th fib International PhD Symposium in Civil Engineering - 23-26 August 2006 - Zurich, Switzerland

The International PhD Symposium has now existed for a decade and has become a milestone in both the agenda of the civil engineering community and the curricula of many PhD students. It is an honour to be the host of this distinguished event, and we shall do our best to ensure its continued success.

Compared to the last Symposium in Delft, we are focusing the covered areas on structural engineering, including the three sub-themes: structural analysis and design, concrete and masonry structures, and steel, timber and composite structures, as well as neighbouring disciplines such as building materials and geotechnical engineering.

The PhD Symposium serves as a forum for international scientific discussion in civil engineering. PhD students have the opportunity to present their work either at the beginning of their thesis, discussing the research plan, or at a later stage, presenting preliminary or final results. Through a rigorous review of both abstracts and full papers, a high quality level was ensured, and useful feedback was provided to improve the clarity and accuracy of the contributions. The efforts of the members of the Scientific Committee who carried out these tasks are gratefully acknowledged.

The Scientific Committee selected 121 contributions out of 140 abstracts for presentation. Finally, 81 of them were submitted as full papers of up to 8 pages, and 75 of those were accepted for printing and oral presentation. Following the general trend of reducing paper consumption and printing costs, only extended abstracts have been published in the printed proceedings. The full-length papers have been stored on a CD-ROM, forming an integral part of the proceedings.

Compared to previous symposia, attendance is considerably smaller. We see this positively as an indication that, in the meantime, many other congress organisers encourage young researchers to participate and present their work independently, even when they have a senior co-author. For the organisation, the smaller number of participants also has advantages. By maintaining the planned five half-days of presentations, only two parallel sessions are needed. This facilitates an overview of all presentations and allows for a fair evaluation of awards.

Hosting this symposium would not have been possible without the generous support of ETH Zurich. The entire necessary infrastructure was made available free of charge, and two funds supervised by the Rector of ETH Zurich donated considerable sums. Our main sponsor, the Civil Engineering Group of the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects (SIA), donated the entire prize money for the awards, and other sponsors (see page 17) helped cover additional expenses. In this way, we succeeded in reducing the conference fee to a moderate level.

Many thanks are due to all other persons and institutions not mentioned individually, as well as to the Organising Committee, which helped make this event a success.