Preface

Abstract

It is a great pleasure to announce that the Latin American Journal of Solids and Structures, LAJSS, will now publish ten articles per issue, except in special editions as the present one, 6 issues per year. This was so decided in order to speed up further the publication of incoming articles. I take the opportunity to announce the new Editorial Board structure of LAJSS, which now comprises some forty members and two Associate Editors, Professors Heraldo da Costa Mattos and Rogério José Marczak. I will be acting as Editor-in-Chief. With this new team, we hope to serve even better authors and readers. With this number, two other important aspects are worth to be cited. First, LAJSS will no longer distribute freely hard copies to authors, readers or libraries, reflecting a major tendency in the publishing market. However, there is no plan at all of LAJSS charging readers or authors. LA-JSS is a 100% free journal, both for authors and for readers, and will remain so. Another point is that LAJSS will no longer process LaTeX files. It will accept only articles produced in WORD, with the equations typed in WORD or in MathType. A new Template is now available and will guide the author in the typeset phase of an article. This issue presents selected expanded articles presented at the 11th International Conference devoted to "Dynamical Systems-Theory and Applications" held in December 5-8, 2011 in Poland. The guest editor, Prof. Jan Awrejcewicz, together with a strong reviewer team, made an excellent work in providing to the LAJSS readers outstanding contributions to the field of Dynamic Systems. I would like to thank Prof. Awrejcewicz for his intense work during these months. Finally, I thank the Brazilian Research Funding Agency, CAPES, for funding LAJSS. I also thank all readers, authors and reviewers for the continuous support to this ever growing journal.