The liberalization of U.S. and European electric power markets presents a critical challenge for renewable sources of energy. Edinger and Kaul survey the technological state-of-the-art and economic aspects of renewable electricity generation, and outline the role of other renewable sources, such as solar, wind, and micro-hydroelectric technologies. Offering an empirical and theoretical assessment of these technologies and their assets and liabilities, the book shows how it is possible to restructure our electric power systems and reorient them toward sustainable and environmentally friendly alternatives.

International climate conferences such as those in Rio de Janeiro and Kyoto have proclaimed the need for environmentally hospitable technologies. A new electricity system, based on renewable resources and small-scale power technologies, is needed badly; their economics and other efficiencies over conventional central power generation with fossil fuels is clear. Edinger and Kaul assess the rewards and risks associated with renewable technologies and outline a feasible path toward a more environmentally friendly, and reasonable, use of limited natural resources and the global ecosystem. One promising approach for industrialized countries is the decentralization of our current public grid systems. This offers an opportunity for developing countries to leapfrog the stage of fossil fuel, held responsible now for environmental pollution, resource depletion and possibly global climate change. The authors present theoretical analyses and empirical evidence to buttress their contentions, mainly, that electric power systems founded on renewable resources are vital prerequisites if we are to achieve the United Nations' target of globally sustained development.

This edited monograph collects theoretical, empirical and political contributions from different fields, focusing on the commercial launch of electric mobility, and intending to shed more light on the complexity of supply and demand. It is an ongoing discussion, both in the public as well as in academia, whether or not electric mobility is capable of gaining a considerable market share in the near future. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and practitioners in the field, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

The Prague Conferences on Information Theory, Statistical Decision Functions, and Random Processes have been organized every three years since 1956. During the eighteen years of their existence the Prague Conferences developed from a platform for presenting results obtained by a small group of researchers into a probabilistic congress, this being documented by the increasing number of participants as well as of presented papers. The importance of the Seventh Prague Conference has been emphasized by the fact that this Conference was held jointly with the eighth European Meeting of Statisticians. This joint meeting was held from August 18 to 23, 1974 at the Technical University of Prague. The Conference was organized by the Institute of Information Theory and Automation of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and was sponsored by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, by the Committee for the European Region of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and by the International As sociation for Statistics in Physical Sciences. More than 300 specialists from 25 countries participated in the Conference. In 57 sessions 164 papers (including 17 invited papers) were read, 128 of which are published in the present two volumes of the Transactions of the Conference. Volume A includes papers related mainly to probability theory and stochastic processes, whereas the papers of Volume B concern mainly statistics and information theory."

The Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Thermoelectrics contains manuscripts from leading experts on topics spanning from material processing to applications in the field of thermoelectrics. The selected manuscripts also describe recent developments on measurement systems of thermoelectric properties, and the design and modelling of thermoelectric generators.

The functionalization of surfaces on the nanoscale is one of the most fascinating and at the same time challenging topics in science. It is the key to tailoring catalysts, sensors, or devices for solar energy conversion, whose functional principle is based on the interaction of an active solid surface with another (liquid or gaseous) phase. As an example, planar transition metal complexes adsorbed on solid supports are promising candidates for novel heterogeneous catalysts. An important feature of these catalysts, compared to supported metal clusters, is the fact that the active sites, i. e. , the coordinated metal centers with their vacant axial coordination sites, are well de?ned and uniform. Metalloporphyrinoids are particularly suitable in this respect because they combine a structure forming element-the rigid molecular frame, which often induces long range order-with an active site, the coordinated metal ion. Its planar coordination environment leaves two axial coordination sites available for additional ligands. If adsorbed on a surface, one of these axial sites is occupied by the underlying substrate. The resulting electronic interaction with the surface can be used to tailor the electronic structure and thereby the reactivity of the metal center. The remaining site is free for the attachment of molecules (sensor functionality) and/or operates as a reaction center (single-site catalysis). Prototype examples are omnipresent in nature, where in particular metallo-tetrapyrrols play a decisive role in important biological processes, with the most prominent examples being iron porphyrins in heme, magnesium porphyrins in chlorophyll, and cobalt corrin in vitamin B12.

The death of Professor Arthur Wright in the summer of 1996 deprived me of a friend and a colleague whose judgement and experience shaped this book. I pay tribute to his contributions to protection and electrical engineering education. In the five years since the first edition appeared, many developments have taken place and it is now necessary to update the book. The use of digital communications and advanced signal processing techniques is now widespread and several fully numeric relays are available from manu facturers. Two new Chapters 13 and 14 have been added to introduce readers to these concepts and associated techniques. Artificial intelligence is making its impact in all engineering applications and power system protection is no exception. Expert systems, fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, adaptive and integrated protection, synchronized measurements using the global positioning system, genetic algorithms, flexible a.c. transmission systems, are some of the techniques considered in connection with protection. Although many of these techniques have not yet found major application in protection, it is nevertheless essential for the educated protection engineer to have a basic understanding of the underlying principles and methodology so that he, or she, can evaluate their suitability for new relaying problems and applications. Chapter 15 was therefore added to guide readers through this developing area. I have also added some new material in other chapters to reflect changes over the past years."

Dynamic Systems (DEDS) are almost endless: military C31 Ilogistic systems, the emergency ward of a metropolitan hospital, back offices of large insurance and brokerage fums, service and spare part operations of multinational fums . . . . the point is the pervasive nature of such systems in the daily life of human beings. Yet DEDS is a relatively new phenomenon in dynamic systems studies. From the days of Galileo to Newton to quantum mechanics and cosmology of the present, dynamic systems in nature are primarily differential equations based and time driven. A large literature and endless success stories have been built up on such Continuous Variable Dynamic Systems (CVDS). It is, however, equally clear that DEDS are fundamentally different from CVDS. They are event driven, asynchronous, mostly man-made and only became significant during the past generation. Increasingly, however, it can be argued that in the modem world our lives are being impacted by and dependent upon the efficient operations of such DEDS. Yet compared to the successful paradigm of differential equations for CVDS the mathematical modelling of DEDS is in its infancy. Nor are there as many successful and established techniques for their analysis and synthesis. The purpose of this series is to promote the study and understanding of the modelling, analysis, control, and management of DEDS. The idea of the series came from editing a special issue of the Proceedings of IEEE on DEOS during 1988.

This is the first of a two-volume work covering the electrical principles syllabuses of all of the major examining bodies including the City & Guilds of London Institute's electrical craft courses. It is also suitable for a wide range of other courses, including the first three years of the BTEC electrical series. Great care has been taken to ensure that the text fully covers the content of the syllabuses concerned, both as published and as interpreted by the examiners in the past. The book is well illustrated with almost 200 line diagrams and photographs. Theories are explained with the help of almost 100 worked examples, an important aid to understanding the practical applications, and there are more than 300 graded exercises for which numerical answers are provided as well as nearly 250 multiple choice questions with solutions. These features make the book ideal as a class text as well as being particularly suitable for private study. A complete list of symbols, abbreviations and units is included, along with eight tables of relevant data and introduction to SI units, this system being used throughout. Each chapter concludes with a summary of the formulas introduced in it. The book will also be useful to practicing technicians wishing to extend their grasp of electrical principles to meet the rapidly expanding requirements of the industry.

This monograph presents a wider spectrum of researches, developments, and case specific studies in the area of smart power systems and integration of renewable energy systems. The book will be for the benefit of a wider audience including researchers, postgraduate students, practicing engineers, academics, and regulatory policy makers. It covers a wide range of topics from fundamentals, and modelling and simulation aspects of traditional and smart power systems to grid integration of renewables; Micro Grids; challenges in planning and operation of a smart power system; risks, security, and stability in smart operation of a power system; and applied research in energy storage.

Information theory is an exceptional field in many ways. Technically, it is one of the rare fields in which mathematical results and insights have led directly to significant engineering payoffs. Professionally, it is a field that has sustained a remarkable degree of community, collegiality and high standards. James L. Massey, whose work in the field is honored here, embodies the highest standards of the profession in his own career. The book covers the latest work on: block coding, convolutional coding, cryptography, and information theory. The 44 contributions represent a cross-section of the world's leading scholars, scientists and researchers in information theory and communication. The book is rounded off with an index and a bibliography of publications by James Massey.

The seventh book in the CHDL Series is composed of a selection of the best articles from the Forum on Specification and Design Languages (FDL'04). FDL is the European Forum to learn and exchange on new trends on the application of languages and models for the design of electronic and heterogeneous systems.

The forum was structured around four workshops that are all represented in the book by outstanding articles: Analog and Mixed-Signal Systems, UML-based System Specification and Design, C/C++-Based System Design and Languages for Formal Specification and Verification.

The Analog and Mixed-Signal Systems contributions bring some answers to the difficult problem of co-simulating discrete and continuous models of computation. The UML-based System Specification and Design chapters bring insight into how to use the Model Driven Engineering to design Systems-on-Chip. The C/C++-Based System Design articles mainly explore system level design with SystemC. The Languages for Formal
Specification and Verification is represented by an invited contribution on the use of temporal assertions for symbolic model checking and simulation. And finally chapter in this book contributed by preeminent members of the automotive design industry presents the recent industry standard AutoSAR.

Overall Advances in Design and Specification Languages for SoCs is an excellent opportunity to catch up with the latest research developments in the field of languages for electronic and heterogeneous system design.

Robust Control in Power Systems deals with the applications of new techniques in linear system theory to control low frequency oscillations in power systems. The book specifically focuses on the analysis and damping of inter-area oscillations in the systems which are in the range of 0.2-1 Hz. The damping control action is injected through high power electronic devices known as flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) controllers. Three commonly used FACTS controllers: controllable series capacitors (CSCs) controllable phase shifters (CPSs) and static var compensators (SVCs) have been used in this book to control the inter-area oscillations.

The overview of linear system theory from the perspective of power system control is explained through examples. The damping control design is formulated as norm optimization problem. The H_infinity, H2 norm of properly defined transfer functions are minimized in linear matrix inequalities (LMI) framework to obtain desired performance and stability robustness. Both centralized and decentralized control structures are used.

Usually the transmission of feedback signal from a remote location encounters delays making it difficult to control the system. Smith predictor based approach has been successfully explored in this book as a solution to such a problem.

Robust Control in Power Systems will be valuable to academicians in the areas of power, control and system theory, as well as professionals in the power industry.

This book collects the latest theoretical and technological concepts in the design and control of various linear machines and drive systems. Discussing advances in the new linear machine topologies, integrated modeling, multi-objective optimization techniques, and high-performance control strategies, it focuses on emerging applications of linear machines in transportation and energy systems. The book presents both theoretical and practical/experimental results, providing a consistent compilation of fundamental theories, a compendium of current research and development activities as well as new directions to overcome critical limitations.

Formal verification has become one of the most important steps in circuit design. Since circuits can contain several million transistors, verification of such large designs becomes more and more difficult. Pure simulation cannot guarantee the correct behavior and exhaustive simulation is often impossible. However, many designs, like ALUs, have very regular structures that can be easily described at a higher level of abstraction. For example, describing (and verifying) an integer multiplier at the bit-level is very difficult, while the verification becomes easy when the outputs are grouped to build a bit-string. Recently, several approaches for formal circuit verification have been proposed that make use of these regularities. These approaches are based on Word-Level Decision Diagrams (WLDDs) which are graph-based representations of functions (similar to BDDs) that allow for the representation of functions with a Boolean range and an integer domain. Formal Verification of Circuits is devoted to the discussion of recent developments in the field of decision diagram-based formal verification. Firstly, different types of decision diagrams (including WLDDs) are introduced and theoretical properties are discussed that give further insight into the data structure. Secondly, implementation and minimization concepts are presented. Applications to arithmetic circuit verification and verification of designs specified by hardware description languages are described to show how WLDDs work in practice. Formal Verification of Circuits is intended for CAD developers and researchers as well as designers using modern verification tools. It will help people working with formal verification (in industry or academia) to keep informed about recent developments in this area.

Elliptic curves have been intensively studied in algebraic geometry and number theory. In recent years they have been used in devising efficient algorithms for factoring integers and primality proving, and in the construction of public key cryptosystems. Elliptic Curve Public Key Cryptosystems provides an up-to-date and self-contained treatment of elliptic curve-based public key cryptology. Elliptic curve cryptosystems potentially provide equivalent security to the existing public key schemes, but with shorter key lengths. Having short key lengths means smaller bandwidth and memory requirements and can be a crucial factor in some applications, for example the design of smart card systems. The book examines various issues which arise in the secure and efficient implementation of elliptic curve systems. Elliptic Curve Public Key Cryptosystems is a valuable reference resource for researchers in academia, government and industry who are concerned with issues of data security. Because of the comprehensive treatment, the book is also suitable for use as a text for advanced courses on the subject.

This book reports on the latest findings in the application of the wide area measurement systems (WAMS) in the analysis and control of power systems. The book collects new research ideas and achievements including a delay-dependent robust design method, a wide area robust coordination strategy, a hybrid assessment and choice method for wide area signals, a free-weighting matrices method and its application, as well as the online identification methods for low-frequency oscillations. The main original research results of this book are a comprehensive summary of the authors' latest six-year study. The book will be of interest to academic researchers, R&D engineers and graduate students in power systems who wish to learn the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of the WAMS.

Constrained Coding and Soft Iterative Decoding is the first work to combine the issues of constrained coding and soft iterative decoding (e.g., turbo and LDPC codes) from a unified point of view. Since constrained coding is widely used in magnetic and optical storage, it is necessary to use some special techniques (modified concatenation scheme or bit insertion) in order to apply soft iterative decoding. Recent breakthroughs in the design and decoding of error-control codes (ECCs) show significant potential for improving the performance of many communications systems. ECCs such as turbo codes and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes can be represented by graphs and decoded by passing probabilistic (a.k.a. soft') messages along the edges of the graph. This message-passing algorithm yields powerful decoders whose performance can approach the theoretical limits on capacity. This exposition uses normal graphs, ' introduced by Forney, which extend in a natural manner to block diagram representations of the system and provide a simple unified framework for the decoding of ECCs, constrained codes, and channels with memory. Soft iterative decoding is illustrated by the application of turbo codes and LDPC codes to magnetic recording channels. For magnetic and optical storage, an issue arises in the use of constrained coding, which places restrictions on the sequences that can be transmitted through the channel; the use of constrained coding in combination with soft ECC decoders is addressed by the modified concatenation scheme also known as reverse concatenation.' Moreover, a soft constraint decoder yields additional coding gain from the redundancy in the constraint, which may be of practical interest in the case of optical storage. In addition, this monograph presents several other research results (including the design of sliding-block lossless compression codes, and the decoding of array codes as LDPC codes). Constrained Coding and Soft Iterative Decoding will prove useful to students, researchers and professional engineers who are interested in understanding this new soft iterative decoding paradigm and applying it in communications and storage systems.

Electric Vehicle Integration into Modern Power Networks provides coverage of the challenges and opportunities posed by the progressive integration of electric drive vehicles. Starting with a thorough overview of the current electric vehicle and battery state-of-the-art, this work describes dynamic software tools to assess the impacts resulting from the electric vehicles deployment on the steady state and dynamic operation of electricity grids, identifies strategies to mitigate them and the possibility to support simultaneously large-scale integration of renewable energy sources. New business models and control management architectures, as well as the communication infrastructure required to integrate electric vehicles as active demand are presented. Finally, regulatory issues of integrating electric vehicles into modern power systems are addressed. Inspired by two courses held under the EES-UETP umbrella in 2010 and 2011, this contributed volume consists of nine chapters written by leading researchers and professionals from the industry as well as academia.

Engineering Technology and Applications contains the contributions presented at the 2014 International Conference on Engineering Technology and Applications (ICETA 2014, Tsingtao, China, 29-30 April 2014). The book is divided into three main topics: - Civil and environmental engineering - Electrical and computer engineering - Mechanical engineering Considerable attention is also paid to big data, cloud computing, neural network algorithms and social network services. The book will be invaluable to professionals and academics in civil, environmental, electrical, computer and mechanical engineering.

Monitoring and Control of Electrical Power Systems using Machine Learning Techniques bridges the gap between advanced machine learning techniques and their application in the control and monitoring of electrical power systems, particularly relevant for heavily distributed energy systems and real-time application. The book reviews key applications of deep learning, spatio-temporal, and advanced signal processing methods for monitoring power quality. This reference introduces guiding principles for the monitoring and control of power quality disturbances arising from integration of power electronic devices and discusses monitoring and control of electrical power systems using benchmark test systems for the creation of bespoke advanced data analytic algorithms.

This book covers smart polymer nanocomposites with perspectives for application in energy harvesting, as self-healing materials, or shape memory materials. The book is application-oriented and describes different types of polymer nanocomposites, such as elastomeric composites, thermoplastic composites, or conductive polymer composites. It outlines their potential for applications, which would meet some of the most important challenges nowadays: for harvesting energy, as materials with the capacity to self-heal, or as materials memorizing a given shape.The book brings together these different applications for the first time in one single platform. Chapters are ordered both by the type of composites and by the target applications. Readers will thus find a good overview, facilitating a comparison of the different smart materials and their applications. The book will appeal to scientists in the fields of chemistry, material science and engineering, but also to technologists and physicists, from graduate student level to researcher and professional.

In response to the expanding role of personal computers in measurement and other industrial applications, this guide shows how to maximize the power of PCs in automation and system control. It demonstrates how to integrate a complete system that precisely monitors the surrounding industrial environment and helps reduce the cost of mass storage, colour displays and other functions by up to 50%.

CMOS DC-DC Converters aims to provide a comprehensive dissertation on the matter of monolithic inductive Direct-Current to Direct-Current (DC-DC) converters. For this purpose seven chapters are defined which will allow the designer to gain specific knowledge on the design and implementation of monolithic inductive DC-DC converters, starting from the very basics.

The series Topics in Organometallic Chemistry presents critical overviews of research results in organometallic chemistry. As our understanding of organometallic structure, properties and mechanisms increases, new ways are opened for the design of organometallic compounds and reactions tailored to the needs of such diverse areas as organic synthesis, medical research, biology and materials science. Thus the scope of coverage includes a broad range of topics in pure and applied organometallic chemistry, where new breakthroughs are being achieved that are of significance to a larger scientific audience. The individual volumes of Topics in Organometallic Chemistry are thematic. Review articles are generally invited by the volume editors.

The 17 chapters of this book grew out of the tutorial lectures given by leading world-class experts at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Effects of Space Weather on Technology Infrastructure" - ESPRIT, which was held in Rhodes on March 25-29, 2004. All manuscripts were refereed and subsequently meticulously edited by the editor to ensure the highest quality for this monograph. I owe particular thanks to the lecturers of the ESPRIT Advanced Research Workshop for producing these excellent tutorial reviews, which convey the essential knowledge and the latest advances in our field. Due to the breadth, extensive literature citations and quality of the reviews we expect this publication to serve extremely well as a reference book. Multimedia material referring to individual chapters of the book is accessible on the accompanying CD. The aim of ESPRIT was to assess existing knowledge and identify future actions regarding monitoring, forecasting and mitigation of space weather induced malfunction and damage of vital technological systems operating in space and on the ground.