Life with Ore Deposits on Earth, our Biennial tagline, directly addresses many of the underpinning geoscience issues related to this new future. It is both exciting and daunting – but it must start with leading-edge research on understanding our Earth’s natural resources, and how we can responsibly explore for, and extract them to securely deliver the future we all want to see for our children.

Limit analysis is concerned with the development of efficient methods for computing the collapse or limit load of structures in a direct manner. It is therefore of intense practical interest to practicing engineers. There have been an enormous number of applications in metal structures. Applications of limit analysis to reinforced concrete structures are more recent and are given in two recent books (W.F. Chen, ‘Plasticity in Reinforced Concrete’, McGraw-Hill, 1982; M.P. Nielsen, ‘Limit Analysis and Concrete Plasticity’, Prentice-Hall, 1984). Applications to typical stability problems in soil mechanics have been the most highly developed aspect of limit analysis so that the basic techniques and many numerical results were summarized in the 1975 book by Chen entitled ‘Limit Analysis and Soil Plasticity’, Elsevier.