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.
•
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.
•
Materials Chemistry
Materials Science
Materials Science
Reference
Professional

Solidification is one of the oldest processes for producing useful implements and remains one of the most important modern commercial processes. Since the 1980s, rapid and fundamental developments in the understanding of solidification have come from both analytical theories and from the widespread availability of powerful computational techniques. This book describes the fundamentals of the technology in the context of these recent developments, presenting them in a coherent way, using consistent notation.
•
Solid Waste & Recycling
Materials Science
Metals & Alloys
Textbook
Professional

This book discusses machine learning algorithms, such as artificial neural networks of different architectures, statistical learning theory, and Support Vector Machines used for the classification and mapping of spatially distributed data. It presents basic geostatistical algorithms as well. The authors describe new trends in machine learning and their application to spatial data. The text also includes case studies based on environmental and pollution data. It includes a CD-ROM with software that will allow both students and researchers to put the concepts to practice.
•
Machine Learning
Statistics
Agriculture & Environmental Sciences
Reference
Professional

With complete proofs and numerous exercises, this book offers a self-contained presentation of the most important tools and methods from Hilbert space theory, with a particular focus on the spectral theory of self-adjoint operators. It also goes further by describing several applications in quantum mechanics, including the analysis of Schrödinger operators and quantum scattering theory. In addition, the book discusses Mourre’s conjugate operator method and its consequences for scattering theory. Based on a one-year course for advanced undergraduates, this text provides a fundamental treatment of the basic ideas of applied Hilbert space theory.
•
Quantum Mechanics
General Physics
Reference
Professional

Peer-to-peer systems are evolving with new information-system architectures, leading to the idea that the principles of decentralization and self-organization will offer new approaches in informatics, especially for systems that scale with the number of users or for which central authorities do not prevail. This book describes a new way of building global agreements (semantic interoperability) based only on decentralized, self-organizing interactions.
•
Computer Engineering
Internet & Multimedia
Reference
Professional

Through a series of original essays, this book unites an international team of renowned researchers and educators around the theme of knowledge dialogue. Spanning topics from natural complexity to neuroscience, from education theory to climate change, from immunology to archaelogy and human migrations, it allows for an atmosphere of constructive criticism and enables the ambition to build a new foundation for the transdisciplinary process.
•
Reference
Professional

Taking a novel, less classical approach to the subject, the authors have written this book with the conviction that signal processing should be fun. Their treatment is less focused on the mathematics and more on the conceptual aspects, allowing students to think about the subject at a higher conceptual level, thus building the foundations for more advanced topics and helping students solve real-world problems. The last chapter pulls together the individual topics into an in-depth look at the development of an end-to-end communication system. Richly illustrated with examples and exercises in each chapter, the book offers a fresh approach to the teaching of signal processing to upper-level undergraduates.
•
Digital Signal Processing
Communications System Design
Reference
Professional

This book demonstrates how bio-inspiration can lead to fully autonomous flying robots. From sensor suite to control strategies, the literature on flying insects is reviewed from an engineering perspective in order to extract useful principles that are then applied to the synthesis of artificial indoor flyers. Artificial evolution is also utilized to search for alternative control systems and behaviours that match the constraints of small flying robots. Specifically, the basic sensory modalities of insects, vision, gyroscopes and airflow sense, are applied to develop navigation controllers for indoor flying robots.
•
Intelligent Systems
Reference
Professional

Describing a field that has been transformed by the recent availability of data from a new generation of space and airborne systems, the authors offer a synthetic geometrical approach to the description of synthetic aperture radar, one that addresses the needs of physicists, radar specialists, as well as experts in image processing. The book begins with a "theoretical emergency kit" that provides the foundation necessary to understand the math and science behind the SAR technology. It then discusses the technique itself, stressing the geometrical approach to radar processing, followed by a description of how these principles are applied by considering SAR design from a radiometric perspective.
•
Digital Signal Processing
Image Processing
Agriculture & Environmental Sciences
Reference
Professional