Ebook: Collision Phenomena in Liquids and Solids

Collision phenomena can be ordinary like a rain drop impacting onto a window, a leaf or
a puddle, or extraordinary such as a meteorite or a bolide collision with Earth. Some are
frequently encountered in science and everyday life, others are extremely rare. Being
very different at first sight, collision phenomena in liquids and solids share many under-
lying common features.
The subject of the present book is highly cross-disciplinary with a very wide scope of
applications in mind, and such a collection of topics in one book does not yet exist, as to
our knowledge. One of the main motivations for providing such a collection of topics is
to underline the commonality among the various occurrences of collision phenomena,
which lead to similar physical and technological ideas and modeling approaches. An
improved in-depth understanding of the phenomena can be expected after recognizing
the common underlying physics involved. A second motivation is that the knowledge
presently available on the subject is extremely widely scattered, mainly according to
applications, and in a large number of different journals. For example, collisions in the
solid mechanics context are considered as a totally different subject than impacts in
the fluid mechanical context, whereas in reality inevitable geometric similarities dic-
tate inevitable kinematic similarities, and in some cases similar rheological behavior,
which greatly unifies these two fields to the extent still unrecognized by the majority
of practitioners. This obscures the true state of the art, with the associated danger that
research may be unintentionally and unnecessarily duplicated or some novel develop-
ments delayed.