A practical guide to environmental, safety, and occupational health audits, this book allows organizations and business to avoid expensive external auditors and retain the knowledge and learning in-house. In contrast to the over-academic and uninspiring tone of most auditing books, this text gives accessible user-friendly advice in a step by step manner. Building on novel auditing techniques designed to overcome common problems in the audit process, emphasizes accurate auditing that is representative and repeatable. It allows any competent manager or safety/environmental officer to undertake in-house audits in a competent and reproducible fashion.
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Health & Safety
Quality Control & Reliability
Reference

Carefully designed to teach thermodynamics to engineers, this book focuses on the phenomena of irreversibility and the notion of entropy. It also presents a general theory of exergy, with methods of analyses that allow engineers to master problems of current interest in the field of energy management. The authors illustrate practical aspects of the theory by descibiing specific applications such as combustion chambers, turbines, compressors, heat pumps, fuel cells, refrigeration, and more.
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Circuits & Devices
Energy
Thermodynamics
Reference

Cellulose is a major constituent of papers made from plant fibers and combustible components of non-food energy crops. An ideal reference for scientists in natural and synthetic polymer research, this book applies basic biology as well as polymer and sugar chemistry to the study of cellulose. It provides key requirements for understanding the complex structure and biosynthesis of cellulose and its dissolution into new solvents. The text also clarifies the enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose leading to simple sugars that can be fermented into bioethanol. It examines the bacteria capable of breaking down cellulose and the derivatives that result from the process.
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Materials Chemistry
Materials Science
Materials Science
Reference
Professional

Recent progress in optical communications has focused on the next generation of the Internet—the Optical Internet. From fundamental to modern aspects, this book provides an understanding of lightwave communication systems in which the lightwave is used as the carrier to transport information over the optical guided media. The text presents optical communication techniques and applications, employing single mode optical fibers as the transmission medium. Additional topics include optical transmitters, optical receivers, optical fiber amplifiers, and optical fiber communication systems. The author also offers both MATLAB ® and Simulink models to illustrate methods.
• Optics and Photonics
Transportation Engineering
Telecommunications
Electrical Engineering Communications
Textbook

A collation of the authors' latest research, this book focuses on control applications that use piezoelectric actuators and sensors. They provide practical examples of engineering applications, such as flexible structures, flexible robotic manipulators, fine motion control, hydraulic control, and shunt damping. For each application, the consecutive process is presented, such as actuator design system modeling, analysis, control strategy formulation, experimental set-up, and control performance. This information is useful in the design of new machines or devices featuring smart material actuators and sensors integrating with piezoelectric materials.
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Machine Design
Electromagnetics & Microwaves
Systems & Controls
Reference

This volume demonstrates the use of advanced control theory to address vibration-related problems in mechanical systems. With particular emphasis on vibration control in high precision positioning systems such as hard disk drives, this book also covers a wide range of applications within automotive, aerospace, aeronautical, and manufacturing engineering. The text introduces various techniques for modeling friction and vibrations in mechanical systems and then demonstrates how to achieve advanced control for vibration rejection and friction compensation. The algorithms used in the book have been implemented on drives for systems developed at the Data Storage Institute.
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Machine Design
Electronics
Systems & Controls
Reference

This second edition of a bestseller provides a comprehensive account of ecological indicators for evaluating the health of a wide variety of ecosystems. It presents a proven framework for selecting, evaluating, and validating ecological indicators and applies this framework to major ecosystem types, including coastal areas, forests, wetlands, fisheries, and agricultural land. The first part of the book provides a complete overview of all relevant ecological indicators—including thermodynamics, resilience estimates, exergy, and emergy indicators. The second part focuses on how to effectively apply the indicators to a number of important ecosystems. It includes numerous examples and case studies that illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each method for specific applications.
• Applied Ecology and Environmental Management
Natural Hazards & Risk
Agriculture
Biodiversity
Reference
Professional

Structured in stand-alone sections, designed specifically for practicing engineers, this book addresses specific reliability and maintainability analysis methods for part design, systems integration and life-cycle sustainment. Unlike many books on this subject, this one departs from the nearly exclusive use of the exponential probability distribution to characterize failure and demonstrates other probability distributions that more accurately describe the true behavior of failure. It emphasizes failure that results from wear-out over the useful life of the part. The engineering, rather than mathematical or statistical approach, sets this book a part.
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Machine Design
Quality Control & Reliability
Mechanics
Reference
Professional

This volume discusses the impacts of contamination on fuel cell performance and the mitigation strategies to improve performance and durability. It covers the nature, sources, and electrochemistry of contaminants; their effects on fuel cell performance and lifetime; and the mechanisms of contamination. Exploring the major findings from experimental and theoretical studies in contamination-related research, the expert contributors present methods and tools used for diagnosing various contamination phenomena, along with strategies for mitigating the adverse effects of contamination. They also describe key issues in the future R&D of fuel cell contamination and control.
• Green Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Industrial Chemistry
Energy
Reference

Written by two scientists widely experienced in paleontology and zoology, this compendium provides a detailed review of animal and plant fossil behavior in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. It includes a wide range of subjects and time periods and also compares patterns of behavior and co-evolution in the past with those of the present-day descendants. There is further discussion on how to evaluate the rates of evolution of behavior and co-evolution at various taxonomic levels. Keeping Boucot’s trademark, easy-to-read style, the text includes many new findings in amber previously unpublished as well as reports not easily accessible.
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Biodiversity
Natural History
Environmental Geology
Reference