Foreword of the Editor

This booklet inaugurates the series Advances in Geotechnical Engineering and Tunnelling. Subsequent issues will follow in irregular terms, either in German or in English language.

The present publication aims to give the reader a short, tractable and as far as possible complete introduction to the young theory of hypoplasticity, which is a new approach to constitutive modelling of granular media in terms of rational continuum mechanics.

I wish to thank Dr. I. Herle and Dr. W. Fellin for many valuable suggestions, Josef Wopfner and Christoph Bliem for working out the exercises and also Marlies Span for the thorough typing.

Author: D. Kolymbas