This book contains the papers presented at the International Symposium on Electromagnetic Fields in Mechatronics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering ISEF'05 which was held in Baiona, Spain on September 15–17, 2005. ISEF conferences have been organized since 1985 as a common initiative of Polish and European researchers who deal with electromagnetic fields applied to electrical engineering. Until now the conferences have been held every two years, either in Poland or in one of European academic centres renowned for electromagnetic research. The Royal Village of Baiona is well-known in the world for its beauty and historical background and meaning, as it was the place where Columbus landed after his travels to the New World. The venue of the conference is very close to Vigo, which is one of the most important cities in Spanish Galicia. The University of Vigo was the logistic centre of the conference.

It is the tradition of the ISEF meetings that they try to tackle quite a vast area of computational and applied electromagnetics. Moreover, the ISEF symposia aim at joining theory and practice, thus the majority of papers are deeply rooted in engineering problems, being simultaneously of high theoretical level. Continuing this tradition, we hope to touch the heart of the matter in electromagnetism.

After the selection process 211 papers were accepted for presentation at the Symposium and almost all of them were presented at the conference both orally and in the poster sessions. The papers have been divided into the following groups:

• Computational Electromagnetics

• Electromagnetic Engineering

• Coupled Field and Special Applications

• Micro- and Special Devices

• Bioelectromagnetics and Electromagnetic Hazards

• Magnetic Material Modelling

The papers which were presented at the symposium had been reviewed and assessed by the sessions' chairmen and the Editorial Board assembled for the postconference issue of ISEF'05. All the papers accepted for further publication were divided into two parts: those of more computational and those of more applicable nature. The latter ones are published here while the first, which contains less papers (26), went to COMPEL journal.

COMPEL: The International Journal for Computation and Mathematics in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, vol. 25, No. 3/2006.

The papers selected for this volume have been grouped in three chapters which cover the topics:

• Fundamental Problems

• Computational Electromagnetics

• Applied Electromagnetism

They introduce some necessary order while reading the book and somehow represent the main directions which are penetrated by researchers dealing with contemporary electromagnetics. Looking at the content of the book one may also notice that more and more researchers are engaging in investigation of electromagnetic applications, especially these connected with mechatronics, information technologies, medicine, biology and material sciences. This is readily seen when looking at a number of papers which belong to each part of the book. Computational techniques which were under development during the last three decades and are still being developed serve as good tools for discovering new electromagnetic phenomena. This means that computational electromagnetics belongs to an application area rather than to research area. Anyway, a lot of researchers are still working on this subject.

The first chapter is devoted to fundamental problems which appear in electromagnetics. The subject has been intensively developed from the very beginning of the history of electromagnetism. Some problems are still the subject of scientific discussions and are still unsolved; other problems are discussed as the background for building numerical models. There is a group of papers dealing with the analysis of material properties (magnetic, dielectric or even biological), and thus the papers have more physical than computational considerations. Such an analysis is somehow out of the scope of international conferences, like COMPUMAG, AEM or CEFC, which rather focus their attention on computational aspects. Also, there are some papers in the chapter which show analytical solutions of the electromagnetic field problems. The analytical approach is nowadays mostly not of interest for researchers, especially those of the younger generation, but this attitude seems not to be supported by the reality of electromagnetism. The analysis of electromagnetic field sometimes requires deeper insight into the structure of mathematical model and this can be done just by means of analytical approach.

The second chapter is devoted to problems widely discussed at all conferences, namely how to improve the efficiency, accuracy and ability of numerical models. Older participants of the conference and readers of the book will remember that a few decades ago the majority of papers concentrated on the problems of how to build FEM solver or how to regard nonlinearity or dynamics in computer modelling. Also, there were strong discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of such numerical methods, such as FEM, FDM, BEM, and during the conferences followers of each particular method tended to form separate groups. Nowadays, these problems are mostly behind us and the interest of researchers is focused on some specific contributions to the existing solvers.

The last chapter, the richest in papers, is a good mirror of what the ISEF conference is. As has already been mentioned, most papers deal with some applications of electromagnetic field and the stress in these papers is put on the phenomena or devices or both, and computational technique is there just as a tool to understand the phenomena, to design a device or to know what hazards can occur. It seems to be very difficult, even impossible, to find some common idea which joins the papers in some groups because, in fact, each paper deals with its own particular problem. Prospective readers are recommended to look at this chapter very carefully and find the paper of their personal interest.

At the end of these remarks let us, the Editors of the book, be allowed to express our thanks to our colleagues who have contributed to the book by peer-reviewing the papers at the conference as well as in the publishing process. We also convey our thanks to IOS Press (Publisher) for their effective collaboration in shaping this editorial enterprise. As ISEF conferences are organised biannually we do hope to keep our strong links with IOS Press in the future.

Xose M. Lopez-Fernandez, Chairman of the Organising Committee

Andrzej Krawczyk, Scientific Secretary

Sławomir Wiak, Chairman of the ISEF Symposium