12th International Conference on High Performance and Optimum Design of Structures and Materials

This scientific event comprises new editions of the High Performance of Structures and Materials (HPSM) as well as the Optimum Design of Structures (OPTI) conferences; it follows the success of a number of meetings on structures and materials and on optimum design that originated in Southampton as long ago as 1989. As the HPSM meetings evolved, they gave rise to the current series, which started in Seville in 2002, and continued in Ancona in 2004, Ostend in 2006, the Algarve in 2008, Tallinn in 2010 and the New Forest, home of the Wessex Institute of Technology in 2012. OPTI started in 1989 in Southampton and then took place in Boston in 1991, Zaragoza in 1993, Miami in 1995, Rome in 1997, Orlando in 1999, Bologna in 2001, Detroit in 2003, Skiathos in 2005, Myrtle Beach in 2007, Algarve in 2009 and New Forest in 2012. Joint HPSM/OPTI meetings took place in Ostend in 2014, Siena in 2016 and Ljubljana in 2018. They were organised as online events in 2020 and 2022 due to the COVID pandemic.

The use of novel materials and new structural concepts is not restricted nowadays to highly technical areas like aerospace, aeronautical applications or the automotive industry, but affects all engineering fields including those such as civil engineering and architecture.

Most high-performance structures require the development of a generation of new materials, which can more easily resist a range of external stimuli or react in a non-conventional manner. Particular emphasis is placed on intelligent structures and materials as well as the application of computation methods for their modelling, control and management.

Optimization techniques have much to offer to those involved in the design of new industrial products. The formulation of optimum design has evolved from the time it was purely an academic topic. It is now able to satisfy the requirements of real-life prototypes. The development of new algorithms, artificial intelligence methods and the appearance of powerful commercial computer codes with easy to use graphical interfaces has created a fertile field for the incorporation of optimization in the design process in all engineering disciplines. For instance, additive manufacturing processes allow the fabrication of optimum designs obtained using topology optimization techniques.

The meeting aims to provide a friendly and useful forum for the interchange of ideas and interaction amongst researchers, designers and scholars in the academic and professional community to share advances in High Performance and Optimum Design of Structures and Materials.

The conference addresses issues involving advanced types of structures, particularly those based on new concepts or new materials and the system design. Contributions are expected to highlight the latest development in design, optimisation, manufacturing and experimentation in those areas. The meeting also aims to search for higher performance sustainable materials, which are now receiving increased attention.

In the field of design optimisation, the conference welcomes contributions on numerical methods and different optimization techniques, as well as advances in new software. Formulations of optimization on life cycle and fail-safe design are very much welcomed. Optimization problems of interest to the meeting involve those related to size, shape and topology of structures and materials and their applications in automotive, aerospace and civil engineering as well as architecture and biomechanics.

Conference Topics

The following list covers some of the topics to be presented at the HPSM/OPTI 2025. Papers on other subjects related to the objectives of the conference are also welcome.

• Composite materials & structures
• Material Characterisation
• Experiments and numerical analysis
• Steel structures
• High performance concretes
• Natural fibre composites
• Transformable structures
• Lightweight structures
• Timber structures