Like electricity and water, data and computing power are necessary commodities in the modern-day economy. A model for the effective regulation and provisioning of computational services will follow a similar paradigm as the existent model for traditional utilities. Emerging Research Surrounding Power Consumption and Performance Issues in Utility Computing explores methods of treating computing resources and materials as a standard utility, charging customers based on their usage and promoting competition among service providers. Including both benefits and hindrances, as well as theoretical concepts and practical considerations, this book provides an in-depth discussion of the utility computing paradigm for computer engineers, service providers, consumers, and academics in the field of computer science. This book includes emerging research on subjects including, but not limited to, Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) architectures, green computing, VMware, and device manufacturing techniques.

The advent of lithium ion batteries has brought a significant shift in the area of large format battery systems. Previously limited to heavy and bulky lead-acid storage batteries, large format batteries were used only where absolutely necessary as a means of energy storage. The improved energy density, cycle life, power capability, and durability of lithium ion cells has given us electric and hybrid vehicles with meaningful driving range and performance, grid-tied energy storage systems for integration of renewable energy and load leveling, backup power systems and other applications. This book discusses battery management system (BMS) technology for large format lithium-ion battery packs from a systems perspective. This resource covers the future of BMS, giving us new ways to generate, use, and store energy, and free us from the perils of non-renewable energy sources. This book provides a full update on BMS technology, covering software, hardware, integration, testing, and safety.

This book presents a state-of-the-art analysis of energy efficiency as applied to mining processes. From ground fragmentation to mineral processing and extractive metallurgy, experts discuss the current state of knowledge and the nagging questions that call for further research. It offers an excellent resource for all mine managers and engineers who want to improve energy efficiency to boost both production efficiency and sustainability. It will also benefit graduate students and experienced researchers looking for a comprehensive review of the current state of knowledge concerning energy efficiency in the minerals industry.

After decades of stability, power systems are currently undergoing a rapid transition - demand patterns are evolving, while supply sources are shifting to renewable energies at an accelerated pace. This book, written by an experienced energy professional, combines the various aspects of supply and demand developments to offer a unified perspective. It highlights the key changes that the world of electric utilities and power systems will face in the coming decade, as well as the major challenges that will emerge as a result. Supplemented by a wealth of global and local data, the book describes the major patterns that affect both supply and demand, and provides a quantified analysis of their impacts on power system grids and markets. Lastly, it explores the new technologies that can enable the success of these transformations.

Fuel Property Estimation and Combustion Process Characterization is a thorough tool book, which provides readers with the most up-to-date, valuable methodologies to efficiently and cost-effectively attain useful properties of all types of fuels and achieve combustion process characterizations for more efficient design and better operation. Through extensive experience in fuels and combustion, Kiang has developed equations and methodologies that can readily obtain reasonable properties for all types of fuels (including wastes and biomass), which enable him to provide guidance for designers and operators in the combustion field, in order to ensure the design, operation, and diagnostics of all types of combustion systems are of the highest quality and run at optimum efficiency. Written for professionals and researchers in the renewable energy, combustion, chemical, and mechanical engineering fields, the information in this book will equip readers with detailed guidance on how to reliably obtain properties of fuels quickly for the design, operation and diagnostics of combustion systems to achieve highly efficient combustion processes.

This book systematically introduces readers to the framework of China's ETS pilots, exploring their design and operating process, the current state of the carbon market, and various barriers encountered. To do so, it deconstructs the Guangdong ETS, which is the largest and most representative of China's seven ETS pilots. The book subsequently describes and evaluates all seven pilots in terms of their efficiency, macro and micro effects, the method involved in the DEA model, the CGE model, and cost-benefit analysis. In turn, in the assessment section it demonstrates how some ETS pilots have failed to control carbon emissions due to inordinately high emissions quotas issued by the local government etc. Further, it argues that ETS should focus on those industries with large emissions and high mitigating potential for the time being, and then gradually expand the scale of its coverage. As China's national ETS is slated for launch on the basis of the lessons learned from the ETS pilots, the book offers a timely and valuable resource for all those who want to understand and forecast the development of China's ETS. It includes a wealth of descriptions and explanations of Chinese government policies involving carbon emissions control, making it a unique resource.

This book addresses the hazard of gas explosions in sealed underground coal mines, and how the risk of explosion can be assessed, modeled, and mitigated. With this text, coal mine operators and managers will be able to identify the risks that lead to underground mine gas explosions, and implement practical strategies to optimize mining safety for workers. In six chapters, the book offers a framework for understanding the sealed coal mine atmosphere, the safety characteristics that are currently in place, and the guidelines to be followed by engineers to improve upon these characteristics. The first part of the book describes the importance and characteristics of underground gas mine explosions in a historical context with data showing the high number of fatalities from explosion incidents, and how risk has been mitigated in the past. Chapters also detail mathematical models and explosibility diagrams for determining and understanding the risk factors involved in mine explosions. Readers will also learn about safety operations, and assessments for the sealed mine atmosphere. With descriptions of chapter case studies, mining engineers and researchers will learn how to apply safety measures in underground coal mines to improve mining atmospheres and save lives.

This book presents the statistical theory of complex wave scattering and quantum transport in physical systems which have chaotic classical dynamics, as in the case of microwave cavities and quantum dots, or which possess quenched randomness, as in the case of disordered conductors - with an emphasis on mesoscopic fluctuations. The statistical regularity of the phenomena is revealed in a natural way by adopting a novel maximum-entropy approach. Shannon's information entropy is maximised, subject to the symmetries and constraints which are physically relevant, within the powerful and non-perturbative theory of random matrices; this is a most distinctive feature of the book. Aiming for a self-contained presentation, the quantum theory of scattering, set in the context of quasi-one-dimensional, multichannel systems, and related directly to scattering problems in mesoscopic physics, is introduced in chapters two and three. The linear-response theory of quantum electronic transport, adapted to the context of mesoscopic systems, is discussed in chapter four. These chapters, together with chapter five on the maximum-entropy approach and chapter eight on weak localization, have been written in a most pedagogical style, suitable for use on graduate courses. In chapters six and seven, the problem of electronic transport through classically chaotic cavities and quasi-one-dimensional disordered systems is discussed. Many exercises are included, most of which are worked through in detail, aiding graduate students, teachers, and research scholars interested in the subject of quantum transport through disordered and chaotic systems.

This book discuss the recent advances and future trends of nanoscience in solar energy conversion and storage. This second edition revisits and updates all the previous book chapters, adding the latest advances in the field of Nanoenergy. Four new chapters are included on the principles and fundamentals of artificial photosynthesis using metal transition semiconductors, perovskite solar cells, hydrogen storage and neutralization batteries. More fundamental aspects can be found in this book, increasing the comparison between theory-experimental achievements and latest developments in commercial devices.

Hydrogen Infrastructure for Energy Applications: Production, Storage, Distribution and Safety examines methodologies, new models and innovative strategies for the optimization and optimal control of the hydrogen logistic chain, with particular focus on a network of integrated facilities, sources of production, storage systems, infrastructures and the delivery process to the end users through hydrogen refueling stations. The book discusses the main motivations and criteria behind the adoption of hydrogen as an energy carrier or future fuel alternative. It presents current research in hydrogen production processes, especially from renewable energy sources, as well as storage and distribution. The book also reviews methods to model hydrogen demand uncertainties and challenges for the design of the future hydrogen supply chain. The authors go on to explore the network planning of hydrogen infrastructures, the safety and risk issues in hydrogen logistics and their future expectations. Energy engineering professionals, researchers and graduate students will find this a helpful resource to understand the methodologies used to assess the feasibility for developing hydrogen supply chains, hydrogen infrastructure and safety practices. Energy analysts and government agents can benefit from the book's detailed discussion of hydrogen energy applicability.

Materials and Water Chemistry for Supercritical Water-cooled Reactors is unique in that it brings together materials and water chemistry, their interrelationship, the historical perspective and their application to SCWR conceptual design. Written by world's leading experts, all active in the area of materials and chemistry R&D in support of GEN IV SCWR, this book presents for the first time a comprehensive reference on these topics, and in particular, how these data relate to the SCWR design itself. This book is an essential text for researchers in the areas of supercritical water-cooled reactor materials and chemistry, working in industry or academia. It will also give newcomers to the field a survey of all of the available literature and a clear understanding of how these studies relate to the design of the SCWR concept. The material presented is at a specialist's level in materials or corrosion science, or in water chemistry of power plants.

There is currently significant interest in exploring and identifying new inorganic solar energy conversion systems based on Earth-abundant non-toxic materials for future sustainable energy applications and technologies. Developments in emergent inorganic absorbers are closely tied to the ability of researchers to correlate and predict device performance from structural and optical properties. The understanding of material structure and bonding and their effect on performance are key to developing guiding principles for design and screening of inorganic photovoltaic materials. Progress toward such understanding is facilitated by state-of-the-art tools for structural and electronic characterisation of semiconductor materials and interfaces, as well as device design and performance analysis. Further insight is provided by computer modelling and simulations. This volume brings together internationally leading scientists working in areas of material design and modelling, structural and electronic characterisation, and device design and performance analysis, to explore and exchange ideas on emerging inorganic thin-film photovoltaics based on Earth abundant non-toxic materials. In this volume, the topics covered include: Indium-free CIGS analogues Bulk and surface characterisation techniques of solar absorbers Novel chalcogenides, pnictides and defect-tolerant semiconductors Materials design and bonding

Fault Diagnosis and Sustainable Control of Wind Turbines: Robust Data-Driven and Model-Based Strategies discusses the development of reliable and robust fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant ('sustainable') control schemes by means of data-driven and model-based approaches. These strategies are able to cope with unknown nonlinear systems and noisy measurements. The book also discusses simpler solutions relying on data-driven and model-based methodologies, which are key when on-line implementations are considered for the proposed schemes. The book targets both professional engineers working in industry and researchers in academic and scientific institutions. In order to improve the safety, reliability and efficiency of wind turbine systems, thus avoiding expensive unplanned maintenance, the accommodation of faults in their early occurrence is fundamental. To highlight the potential of the proposed methods in real applications, hardware-in-the-loop test facilities (representing realistic wind turbine systems) are considered to analyze the digital implementation of the designed solutions. The achieved results show that the developed schemes are able to maintain the desired performances, thus validating their reliability and viability in real-time implementations. Different groups of readers-ranging from industrial engineers wishing to gain insight into the applications' potential of new fault diagnosis and sustainable control methods, to the academic control community looking for new problems to tackle-will find much to learn from this work.

This book traces the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States from the 1950s when electricity from nuclear power was expected to be too cheap to meter, to the 1990s when the nuclear power industry lies in shambles and the landscape is dotted with the billion dollar carcasses of unfinished or inoperable nuclear power plants. Using the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island as a case study, and reviewing the civil racketeering trial relating to that plant, McCallion details how a fatal combination of fraud, incompetence, and naivete has driven utility companies to the brink (and in some cases, beyond the brink) of bankruptcy in the vain quest for the nuclear power fix.

This book derives an explicit analytical pattern (or framework) that permits the examination and optimization of biogas production systems. It provides a concise overview of the current status of biogas and biogas coupled agricultural systems in China, and introduces evaluation methods for energy efficiency, environmental emissions, economic performance and sustainability assessment approaches. Based on empirical studies, it also explores future options for the system development by focusing on emissions mitigation, biogas energy efficiency and system sustainability. Systematic methods of life cycle assessment and thermodynamic analysis may provide new angles for biogas system evaluation. The system discussed is not only a biogas producer, but also a biogas-linked ecological agricultural system, which has the potential to broaden the applicable scopes of renewable energy and eco-agricultural management. The comprehensive, in-depth knowledge and experience presented provide new analytical approaches for researchers in relevant fields and shed light on the construction and operation of emerging anaerobic digestion and biogas industries. This book is a valuable resource for researchers focusing on biogas system modeling, project managers and policymakers.

This book comprising seven parts is organized under two sections. The first section deals with environment containing four parts, whereas the second section, containing three parts, is on energy. The first part deals with some aspects of hydrologic impacts of global warming and anthropogenic changes. Part II is on bio-environment and discusses plants, biomass, and bacterial species. Part III focuses on chemical environment. Section one is concluded with Part IV on social environment. Section two starts out with Part V on solar energy. Hydropower is discussed in Part VI. The concluding Part VII deals with biogas. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the field of water resources, hydrology, environmental resources, agricultural engineering, watershed management, earth sciences, as well as those engaged in natural resources planning and management. Graduate students and those wishing to conduct further research in water and environment and their development and management may find the book to be of value.

Sustainable Hydropower in West Africa: Planning, Operation, and Challenges provides a comprehensive overview of the planning, deployment and management of hydropower in West Africa and similar regions. The authors use a practical approach to analyze available technology, modeling methodologies and sustainability aspects, such as the dependence between climate and hydropower, and socio-economic and environmental impacts. They discuss the need for innovative solutions and how to close research gaps in the field for this region. Although more than 50% of West Africa's hydropower potential is still untapped, re-engineering and maintenance of existing hydropower plants is a key issue and is discussed. Issues of productivity and optimization are also covered, as well as the introduction of new technology and integration of hydropower into existing energy systems-renewable energy systems, in particular. Policy and regulation are also examined, considering competing needs when managing water resources. The final chapter offers a summary of activities, strategies, policies and technology for easy reference and practical use. Due to its wide coverage and real life examples, this is a useful reference for engineering professionals in the field of hydropower, working in West Africa and regions with similar conditions. This book helps engineers make technology and location decisions for planning, deploying and operating hydropower plants. The book's accessible language and international authorship also allows for easy use by energy researchers, analysts and policy makers who need information for the analysis, modeling, financing, implementation and regulation of hydropower in West Africa and related regions.

Continuing advancements in electronics creates the possibility of communicating with more people at greater distances. Such an evolution calls for more efficient techniques and designs in radio communications. Emerging Innovations in Microwave and Antenna Engineering provides innovative insights into theoretical studies on propagation and microwave design of passive and active devices. The content within this publication is separated into three sections: the design of antennas, the design of the antennas for the RFID system, and the design of a new structure of microwave amplifier. Highlighting topics including additive manufacturing technology, design application, and performance characteristics, it is designed for engineers, electricians, researchers, students, and professionals, and covers topics centered on modern antenna and microwave circuits design and theory.

This book on PVT and Phase Behaviour Of Petroleum Reservoir Fluids is volume 47 in the Developments in Petroleum Science series. The chapters in the book are: Phase Behaviour Fundamentals, PVT Tests and Correlations, Phase Equilibria, Equations of State, Phase Behaviour Calculations, Fluid Characterisation, Gas Injection, Interfacial Tension, and Application in Reservoir Simulation.