This book will sell because it demonstrates methods of modelling widely-used composite materials that will improve their reliability and/or decrease their manufacturing costs. Both reliability and cost are vital factors in the selection of any material for use in any of the various sub-disciplines of engineering.

Marcin Kaminski teaches theoretical mechanics, strength of materials and computational and numerical methods in civil engineering as the Chair of Mechanics and Materials at the Technical University of Lodz. He has published over seventy articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and several books and has given many conference presentations. He spent a sabbatical leave at Rice University in Texas as the fellow of the Foundation for Polish Science in 1999/2000. He received the John Argyris Award in computational mechanics from ECCOMAS and Elsevier in 2001, the JT Oden Faculty Fellowship in the University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and is a member of IASS, SIAM, GAMM and IACM.

Professor Kaminski's research interests include: probabilistic and stochastic methods in computational mechanics of solids, structures and fluids, numerical analysis of stochastic reliability in engineering structures, the implementations of probabilistic procedures into FEM, BEM and FDM-based computer programs, computational modeling of stochastic aging processes in engineering and applied science, homogenization methods for composite materials as well as the software development for stochastic symbolic computations using MAPLE.