IMPLAST 2007 is the 9th symposium in a series of symposia on Large Deformation Mechanics, bringing together scientists on related fields as • Experimental Mechanics of continua subjected to slow, medium and high velocity loads, • Constitutive Modelling of the continua, • Numerical Methods suitable to solve such problems. The first symposium was held in 1973 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. It was organised by Professor N. K. Gupta and Professor B. Karunes. Except the seventh symposium all following symposia took place at the campus of IIT Delhi and were organised by Professor N. K. Gupta. It my be worthwile to mention that the international participation was steadily growing. Soon the idea arised to transfer the venue also to other countries. Indeed, the seventh IMPLAST symposium was organised by Professor X. L. Zhao and Professor R. H. Grzebieta in Melbourne/Australia. The present (9th) symposium takes place in the new Congress Halls of Ruhr-University Bochum. Participation is seen from 26 countries worldwide. A large number of internationally recognized researchers have joined the IMPLAST’09 Scientific Committee. By this they contributed to and ensured the quality of submitted papers and lectures. The editors are very thankful to each of them. A list of the members is given subsequently. The Proceedings were set with LATEX typesetting program. The present Proceedings is organised according to the three topic lines mentioned above. The reader should be aware that a strict zoning would not always be possible. The editors like to thank Mr. Birk Liedmann for his great editorial help. Especially he checked all figures and formulas as well as the final layout. Further thanks are going to the publisher Dr. Martin Woesler and his team of The Bochum University Press.