Proceedings of the 5th International Conference: Transilvania University of Brasov 16 - 17 October 2014, Brasov, Romania

After receiving many favorable comments and having interesting discussions regarding the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference ?Advanced Composite Materials Engineering? COMAT 2012, and the Proceedings of the 5th International Conference ?Computational Mechanics and Virtual Engineering? COMEC 2013, we are pleased to present these Proceedings of the 5th International Conference ?Advanced Composite Materials Engineering? and the 3rd International Conference ?Research & Innovation in Engineering? COMAT 2014. This conference was organized with the important support of Transilvania University of Brasov, Romanian Academy of Technical Sciences and Romanian Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, to whom we thank very much. This conference was dedicated to Professor Ioan Goia, at his 80th birthday, because he was a great Professor at Transilvania University of Brasov for many years, and he supported these conferences from the very beginning. He is an extraordinary Professor, who had astonishing accomplishments, kindness, patience, dedication and optimism. Professor Ioan Goia is a great example for the younger generations, and he is always remembered for his great devotion to teaching and helping students. The research and innovation in engineering in general, and in particular advanced composite materials engineering, are ever more important in everyday activities, and they include, between many other techniques, geometric models, analysis, simulation, optimization and decision making tools, within a computer-generated environment, that accelerates product development, which is the main purpose of any engineering effort. The applications are very diverse and include manufacturing, aerospace, civil engineering structures, communication, geotechnics, flow problems, automotive engineering, predictive surgery, transportation, geo-environmental modeling, biomechanics, electromagnetism, medicine, prediction of natural physical events, and metal forming, just to mention a few. These Proceedings of COMAT 2014 include 50 papers, which analyze many important practical applications. The topics range from energy release rate evaluation in sandwich composite structures to structural synthesis, analysis and design of the modular anthropomorphic grippers for industrial robots, from in-plane vibrations of pinned-fixed heterogeneous curved beams under a concentrated force to modeling and simulation of an acoustic cloak, from the finite elements analysis vs. experimental buckling behavior of the thinwalled plane gussets to the mathematical model of a special vehicle clutch servomechanism. We want to thank very much Professor Sorin Vlase for his remarkable effort and dedication for the organization of this international conference, Professor György Szeidl for his distinguished chairmanship, and the organizing committee for their continuous assistance. We also thank all the conference participants their interesting presentations, and Mrs. Sophia Dediu for her assistance in preparing this volume. There is, certainly, much more that can be said about these engineering research than we presented here. We hope that the papers included here will provide ideas for our audience, and will stimulate more research, development and applications. We look forward to receiving comments and suggestions from our readers.