ISMA-USD 2026

The 2026 Leuven Conference on Noise and Vibration Engineering will be held from 7 till 9 September in Leuven, Belgium. It is the 32 nd international conference in a series of annual courses and biennial conferences on structural dynamics, modal testing and noise and vibration engineering, organised by the KU Leuven Department of Mechanical Engineering. The conference provides a forum for engineers, researchers and other professionals active in the field of modelling, analysing, testing and improving the noise and vibration characteristics of mechanical and mechatronic systems and civil structures. A strong emphasis is on combining excellent academic research activities with top-notch industrial innovations and applications. The conference combines expertise in the ‘noise’ and ‘vibration’ fields by stressing common measurement, modelling, analysis and control technologies and leveraging upon new paradigms such as digital twin, model based system engineering and artificial intelligence. The meeting will provide a further impetus to the cross fertilization of ideas in both areas. The conference program will include keynote lectures, tutorials and invited and contributed papers in specialised areas of noise and vibration engineering and structural dynamics. The focus of the conference is on experimental and numerical methods, with special attention to recent applications in vehicle, machine and civil engineering. Fields with a strong interaction between noise and vibration behaviour will be stressed. Modal analysis and structural dynamic testing remains one of the backbones of the conference, and herein we would like to emphasise limiting factors such as product and test uncertainty as well as applications in the field of smart monitoring and damage assessment. The continuous link between real assets and their digital counterparts is also exploited in digitalntwin enabled noise and vibration research innovations and industrial applications. The 11 th international conference on Uncertainty in Structural Dynamics – USD2026 will be organised in conjunction with ISMA2026. Over the past decades, it is more and more acknowledged that including uncertainty in numerical analysis embodies a very useful and valuable application of the increasing capabilities of modern (high-performance) computer facilities, both in science and in industry. Non-deterministic methodologies enable the numerical simulation of uncertain or variable processes, providing information on ranges of possible behavior rather than unique predictions. This information can only increase the trustworthiness of the underlying analysis, and proves to be of great value in the virtual prototyping process that is becoming a standard in current design engineering practice. The objective of the USD conference series is to gather scientists and engineers that are active in the field of uncertainty modelling in structural dynamics. The conference intends to create an open discussion forum on current developments and practices in this research area. The conference topics range over analysis techniques, implementation strategies and applications of non-deterministic numerical methods in structural dynamics, covering probabilistic as well as non-probabilistic approaches.