A guide to the wide-variety of waste valorisation techniques related to various biomass, waste materials and by products Waste Valorisation provides a comprehensive review of waste chemistry and its application to the generation of value-added products. The authors - noted experts on the topic - offer a clear understanding of waste diversity, drivers and policies governing its valorisation based on the location. The book provides information on the principles behind various valorisation schemes and offers a description of general treatment options with their evaluation guidelines in terms of cost, energy consumption and waste generation. Each of the book's chapters contain an introduction which summarises the current production and processing methods, yields, energy sources and other pertinent information for each specific type of waste. The authors focus on the most relevant novel technologies for value-added processing of waste streams or industrial by-products which can readily be integrated into current waste management systems. They also provide the pertinent technical, economic, social and environmental evaluations of bioconversions as future sustainable technologies in a biorefinery. This important book: Presents the most current technologies which integrate waste and/or by-product valorisation Includes discussions on end-product purity and life-cycle assessment challenges Explores relevant novel technologies for value-added processing of waste streams or industrial by-products which can be integrated into current waste management systems Offers a guide to waste reuse, a key sustainability goal for existing biorefineries wishing to reduce material and environmental costs Written for academic researchers and industrial scientists working in agricultural and food production, bioconversions and waste management professionals, Waste Valorisation is an authoritative guide to the chemistry and applications of waste materials and provides an overview of the most recent developments in the field.

Compliant mechanisms and actuators are growing in importance due to their benefits in robotics, medical technology, sensor applications, or in handling compressible objects. This book helps to understand the mechanical behavior of compliant systems. Suggested classifications and different modeling methods are shown that allow for the description of compliant systems.

Microphone arrays have attracted a lot of interest over the last few decades since they have the potential to solve many important problems such as noise reduction/speech enhancement, source separation, dereverberation, spatial sound recording, and source localization/tracking, to name a few. However, the design and implementation of microphone arrays with beamforming algorithms is not a trivial task when it comes to processing broadband signals such as speech. Indeed, in most sensor arrangements, the beamformer output tends to have a frequency-dependent response. One exception, perhaps, is the family of differential microphone arrays (DMAs) who have the promise to form frequency-independent responses. Moreover, they have the potential to attain high directional gains with small and compact apertures. As a result, this type of microphone arrays has drawn much research and development attention recently. This book is intended to provide a systematic study of DMAs from a signal processing perspective. The primary objective is to develop a rigorous but yet simple theory

for the design, implementation, and performance analysis of DMAs. The theory includes some signal processing techniques for the design of commonly used first-order, second-order, third-order, and also the general "N"th-order DMAs. For each order, particular examples are given on how to form standard directional patterns such as the dipole, cardioid, supercardioid, hypercardioid, subcardioid, and quadrupole. The study demonstrates the performance of the different order DMAs in terms of beampattern, directivity factor, white noise gain, and gain for point sources. The inherent relationship between differential processing and adaptive beamforming is discussed, which provides a better understanding of DMAs and why they can achieve high directional gain. Finally, we show how to design DMAs that can be robust against white noise amplification.

Musical Sound, Instruments, and Equipment offers a basic understanding of sound, musical instruments and music equipment, geared towards a general audience and non-science majors. The book begins with an introduction of the fundamental properties of sound waves, and the perception of the characteristics of sound. The relation between intensity and loudness, and the relation between frequency and pitch are discussed. The basics of propagation of sound waves, and the interaction of sound waves with objects and structures of various sizes are introduced. Standing waves, harmonics and resonance are explained in simple terms, using graphics that provide a visual understanding.

In the course of the years the volumes in the Acoustical Imaging Series have developed to become well-known and appreciated reference works. Offering both a broad perspective on the state of the art in the field as well as an in-depth look at its leading edge research, this Volume 30 in the Series contains again an excellent collection of contributions, presented in five major categories:

This new book synthesizes a wide range of interdisciplinary literature to provide the state-of-the art of biomedical implants. It discusses materials and explains the three basic requirements for implant success from a surface engineering perspective: biological compatibility, biomechanical compatibility, morphological compatibility. Biomedical, mechanical, and materials engineers will find this book indispensable for understanding proper treatment of implant surfaces in order to achieve clinical success. Highlights include: - Coverage of surface engineering of polymer, metallic, ceramic and composite implant materials; - Coverage of chemical, mechanical, physical, thermal, and combined surface modification technologies; - Explanations of interfacial reaction between vital tissue and non-vital implant surface; and - Methodologies and technologies for modification of surface layer/zone to promote the osteo-integration, the ultimate success for biomedical implants in both dental and medical practice.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the fascinating topic of audio source separation based on non-negative matrix factorization, deep neural networks, and sparse component analysis. The first section of the book covers single channel source separation based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). After an introduction to the technique, two further chapters describe separation of known sources using non-negative spectrogram factorization, and temporal NMF models. In section two, NMF methods are extended to multi-channel source separation. Section three introduces deep neural network (DNN) techniques, with chapters on multichannel and single channel separation, and a further chapter on DNN based mask estimation for monaural speech separation. In section four, sparse component analysis (SCA) is discussed, with chapters on source separation using audio directional statistics modelling, multi-microphone MMSE-based techniques and diffusion map methods. The book brings together leading researchers to provide tutorial-like and in-depth treatments on major audio source separation topics, with the objective of becoming the definitive source for a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible treatment. This book is written for graduate students and researchers who are interested in audio source separation techniques based on NMF, DNN and SCA.

Audio Coding: Theory and Applications provides succinct coverage of audio coding technologies that are widely used in modern audio coding standards. Delivered from the perspective of an engineer, this book articulates how signal processing is used in the context of audio coding. It presents a detailed treatment of contemporary audio coding technologies and then uses the DRA audio coding standard as a practical example to illustrate how numerous technologies are integrated into a fully-fledged audio coding algorithm. Drawing upon years of practical experience and using numerous examples and illustrations Dr. Yuli You, gives a description of practical audio coding technologies including: * Designing high-performance algorithms that can be readily implemented on fixed-point or integer microprocessors. * How to properly implement an audio decoder on various microprocessors. Transient detection and adaptation of time-frequency resolution of subband filters. * Psychoacoustic models and optimal bit allocation. Audio Coding: Theory and Applications will be a valuable reference book for engineers in the consumer electronics industry, as well as students and researchers in electrical engineering.

This book gathers the proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Hybrid RANS-LES Methods, which was held on March 19-21 in College Station, Texas, USA. The different chapters, written by leading experts, reports on the most recent developments in flow physics modelling, and gives a special emphasis to industrially relevant applications of hybrid RANS-LES methods and other turbulence-resolving modelling approaches. The book addresses academic researchers, graduate students, industrial engineers, as well as industrial R&D managers and consultants dealing with turbulence modelling, simulation and measurement, and with multidisciplinary applications of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), such as flow control, aero-acoustics, aero-elasticity and CFD-based multidisciplinary optimization. It discusses in particular advanced hybrid RANS-LES methods. Further topics include wall-modelled Large Eddy Simulation (WMLES) methods, embedded LES, and a comparison of the LES methods with both hybrid RANS-LES and URANS methods. Overall, the book provides readers with a snapshot on the state-of-the-art in CFD and turbulence modelling, with a special focus to hybrid RANS-LES methods and their industrial applications.

This book represents the HELS (Helmholtz equation least squares) theory and its applications for visualizing acoustic radiation from an arbitrarily shaped vibrating structure in free or confined space. It culminates the most updated research work of the author and his graduate students since 1997. The book contains six chapters. The first serves as a review of the fundamentals in acoustics and the rest cover five specific topics on the HELS theory.

Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is a high-fidelity approach to the numerical simulation of turbulent flows. Recent developments have shown LES to be able to predict aerodynamic noise generation and propagation as well as the turbulent flow, by means of either a hybrid or a direct approach.

This book is based on the results of two French/German research groups working on LES simulations in complex geometries and noise generation in turbulent flows. The results provide insights into modern prediction approaches for turbulent flows and noise generation mechanisms as well as their use for novel noise reduction concepts.

This volume collects the papers from the 2013 World Conference on Acoustic Emission in Shanghai. The latest research and applications of Acoustic Emission (AE) are explored, with particular emphasis on detecting and processing of AE signals, development of AE instrument and testing standards, AE of materials, engineering structures and systems, including the processing of collected data and analytical techniques as well as experimental case studies.

This book presents all aspects of situational awareness using acoustic signals. It starts by presenting the science behind understanding and interpretation of sound signals. The book then goes on to provide various signal processing techniques used in acoustics to find the direction of sound source, localize gunfire, track vehicles and detect people. The necessary mathematical background and various classification and fusion techniques are presented. The book contains majority of the things one would need to process acoustic signals for all aspects of situational awareness in one location. The book also presents array theory, which is pivotal in finding the direction of arrival of acoustic signals. In addition, the book presents techniques to fuse the information from multiple homogeneous/heterogeneous sensors for better detection. MATLAB code is provided for majority of the real application, which is a valuable resource in not only understanding the theory but readers can also use the code as a spring-board to develop their own application based software code.

This book puts the focus on serving human listeners in the sound field synthesis although the approach can be also exploited in other applications such as underwater acoustics or ultrasonics. The author derives a fundamental formulation based on standard integral equations and the single-layer potential approach is identified as a useful tool in order to derive a general solution. He also proposes extensions to the single-layer potential approach which allow for a derivation of explicit solutions for circular, planar, and linear distributions of secondary sources. Based on above described formulation it is shown that the two established analytical approaches of Wave Field Synthesis and Near-field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics constitute specific solutions to the general problem which are covered by the single-layer potential solution and its extensions.

This book offers an overview of some recent advances in the Computational Bioacoustics methods and technology. In the focus of discussion is the pursuit of scalability, which would facilitate real-world applications of different scope and purpose, such as wildlife monitoring, biodiversity assessment, pest population control, and monitoring the spread of disease transmitting mosquitoes. The various tasks of Computational Bioacoustics are described and a wide range of audio parameterization and recognition tasks related to the automated recognition of species and sound events is discussed. Many of the Computational Bioacoustics methods were originally developed for the needs of speech, audio, or image processing, and afterwards were adapted to the requirements of automated acoustic recognition of species, or were elaborated further to address the challenges of real-world operation in 24/7 mode. The interested reader is encouraged to follow the numerous references and links to web resources for further information and insights. This book is addressed to Software Engineers, IT experts, Computer Science researchers, Bioacousticians, and other practitioners concerned with the creation of new tools and services, aimed at enhancing the technological support to Computational Bioacoustics applications. STTM, Speech Technology and Text Mining in Medicine and Health Care This series demonstrates how the latest advances in speech technology and text mining positively affect patient healthcare and, in a much broader sense, public health at large. New developments in text mining methods have allowed health care providers to monitor a large population of patients at any time and from any location. Employing advanced summarization techniques, patient data can be readily extracted from extensive clinical documents in electronic health records and immediately made available to the physician. These same summarization techniques can also aid the healthcare provider in extracting from the large corpora of medical literature the relevant information for treating the patient. The series topics include the design and acceptance of speech-enabled robots that assist in the operating room, studies of signal processing and acoustic modeling for speech and communication disorders, advanced statistical speech enhancement methods for creating synthetic voice, and technologies for addressing speech and language impairments. Titles in the Series consist of both authored books and edited contributions. All authored books and contributed works are peer-reviewed. The Series is for speech scientists and speech engineers, machine learning experts, biomedical engineers, medical speech pathologists, linguists, and healthcare professionals

This thesis discusses the privacy issues in speech-based applications such as biometric authentication, surveillance, and external speech processing services. Author Manas A. Pathak presents solutions for privacy-preserving speech processing applications such as speaker verification, speaker identification and speech recognition. The author also introduces some of the tools from cryptography and machine learning and current techniques for improving the efficiency and scalability of the presented solutions. Experiments with prototype implementations of the solutions for execution time and accuracy on standardized speech datasets are also included in the text. Using the framework proposed may now make it possible for a surveillance agency to listen for a known terrorist without being able to hear conversation from non-targeted, innocent civilians."

Hardbound. This volume contains six review articles dealing with topics of current research interest in optics and in related fields.The first article deals with the so-called embedding method, which has found many useful applications in the study of wave propagation in random media. The second article presents a review of an interesting class of non-linear optical phenomena which have their origin in the dependence of the complex dielectric constant of some media on the light intensity. These phenomena which include self-focusing, self-trapping and self-modulation have found many applications, for example in fiber optics devices, signal processing and computer technology. The next article is concerned with gap solitons which are electromagnetic field structures which can exist in nonlinear media that have periodic variation in their linear optical properties, with periodicities of the order of the wavelength of light. Both qualitative and quantitative

This book deals with methods of measurement and evaluation of environmental noise based on an auditory neural and brain-oriented model. The model consists of the autocorrelation function (ACF) and the interaural cross-correlation function (IACF) mechanisms for signals arriving at the two ear entrances. Even when the sound pressure level of a noise is only about 35 dBA, people may feel annoyed due to the aspects of sound quality. These aspects can be formulated by the factors extracted from the ACF and IACF. Several examples of measuring environmental noise-from outdoor noise such as that of aircraft, traffic, and trains, and indoor noise such as caused by floor impact, toilets, and air-conditioning-are demonstrated. According to the noise measurement and evaluation, applications for sound design are discussed. This book provides an excellent resource for students, researchers, and practitioners in a wide range of fields, such as the automotive, railway, and electronics industries, and soundscape, architecture, and acoustics.