Special issue of Advances in Polymer technology on Thermoplastic CompositeMaterials

Preface This issue of Advances in Polymer Technology is devoted to the publication of selected papers presented in the session Thermoplastic CompositeMaterials— THEPLAC 2009 of the International Conference on Composite Materials (ICCM-17, http://www .iccm17.org), held July 2009 in Edinburgh. TheICCM conference series represents the largest composite materials gathering. In 2009, the Edinburgh Conference was attended by 1,200 delegates from five continents. This conference incorporated a special session on Thermoplastic CompositeMaterials—THEPLAC 2009, which is part of a series of international workshops on thermoplastic composites materials that is held in the south-east region of Italy, Puglia, under the auspices of the University of Salento, CETMA and SAMPE, Italy, every two years (http://www.cetma.it/thep2009). The objective of these workshops is to provide a forum for the presentation of the latest research and development findings within the field of thermoplastic matrix composites, bringing together scientists and engineers from both academia and industry. The last THEPLAC event in 2009 was exceptional in holding a special session of the ICCM-17 meeting in Scotland, where 35 papers were presented. It was deemed to have attracted the widest audience of the concurrent sessions. The next international workshop on thermoplastic composite materials, THEPLAC 2011 (http://www.cetma.it/thep2009), is to be held in June, 2011, in the Salento area of the Puglia region in south Italy. This special issue of Advances in Polymer Technology is focused on the theme “Processing and Manufacture of Thermoplastic Matrix Composites” and comprises six selected papers form the session THEPLAC 2009 of ICCM-17. The papers have been rigorously reviewed by international experts in the field. Other manuscripts that were not sufficiently focused on processing and manufacturing were nevertheless subjected to a similar rigorous reviewing procedure. These will be published in subsequent issues of Advances in Polymer Technology. Professor Alfonso Maffezzoli has taken the initiative to organize the collection of manuscripts, in the capacity of Guest Editor, and has worked closely with Dr. Leno Mascia (Editor, Europe) on the reviewing of the manuscripts. We appreciate the enthusiastic collaboration that we have received from both authors and reviewers in processing the manuscripts for publication in Advances in Polymer Technology. We also thank Dr. Marino Xanthos and Dr. Theodore Davidson for their encouragement and support with this initiative and for allowing us to use an off-line procedure for dealing with the manuscripts.