This book covers the different aspects of tropical natural fibre composites in areas such as properties, design and analysis, manufacturing techniques, material selection of kenaf, oil palm, sugar palm, pineapple leaf, coconut, sugarcane and banana based fibre composites. Important properties such as mechanical and thermal of natural fibres as well their composites are presented. A study on the composite fibre-matrix interface is highlighted together with the design process and analysis of products from natural fibre composites. An overview on the manufacturing techniques (conventionally used to produce fibre glass fibre composites) such as pultrusion and filament winding is described to produce natural fibre composites. The importance of material selection system to obtain the most optimum materials for application in engineering components from natural fibre composites is covered with a strong focus on the concurrent engineering for natural fibre composites.

This brief reviews current research on magnetic skyrmions, with emphasis on formation mechanisms, observation techniques, and materials design strategies. The response of skyrmions, both static and dynamical, to various electromagnetic fields is also covered in detail. Recent progress in magnetic imaging techniques has enabled the observation of skyrmions in real space, as well as the analysis of their ordering manner and the details of their internal structure. In metallic systems, conduction electrons moving through the skyrmion spin texture gain a nontrivial quantum Berry phase, which provides topological force to the underlying spin texture and enables the current-induced manipulation of magnetic skyrmions. On the other hand, skyrmions in an insulator can induce electric polarization through relativistic spin-orbit interaction, paving the way for the control of skyrmions by an external electric field without loss of Joule heating. Because of its nanometric scale, particle nature, and electric controllability, skyrmions are considered as potential candidates for new information carriers in the next generation of spintronics devices.

In an age of increasing complexity, diversification and change, customers expect services that cater to their needs and to their tastes. Emotional Engineering vol 2. describes how their expectations can be satisfied and managed throughout the product life cycle, if producers focus their attention more on emotion. Emotional engineering provides the means to integrate products to create a new social framework and develops services beyond product realization to create of value across a full lifetime. 14 chapters cover a wide range of topics that can be applied to product, process and industry development, with special attention paid to the increasing importance of sensing in the age of extensive and frequent changes, including: Multisensory stimulation and user experience Physiological measurement Tactile sensation Emotional quality management Mental model Kansei engineering. Emotional Engineering vol 2 builds on Dr Fukuda's previous book, Emotional Engineering, and provides readers with a holistic view of its research and applications, enabling them to make strategic decisions on how they can go further beyond product realization. It is recommended for all pioneers in industry, academia and government, who are making tremendous efforts to work with their customers to create value.

Design happens everywhere, whether in animate objects (e.g., dendritic lung structures, bacterial colonies, and corals), inanimate patterns (river basins, beach slope, and dendritic crystals), social dynamics (pedestrian traffic flows), or engineered systems (heat dissipation in electronic circuitry). This "design in nature" often takes on remarkably similar patterns, which can be explained under one unifying Constructal Law. This book explores the unifying power of the Constructal Law and its applications in all domains of design generation and evolution, ranging from biology and geophysics to globalization, energy, sustainability, and security. The Constructal Law accounts for the universal tendency of flow systems to morph into evolving configurations that provide greater and easier access over time. The Constructal Law resolves the many and contradictory ad hoc statements of "optimality", end design, and destiny in nature, such as minimum and maximum entropy production and minimum and maximum flow resistance, and also explains the designs that are observed and copied in biomimetics. Constructal Law and the Unifying Principle of Design covers the fundamentals of Constructal Theory and Design, as well as presenting a variety of state-of-the-art applications. Experts from the biological, physical and social sciences demonstrate the unification of all design phenomena in nature, and apply this knowledge to novel designs in modern engineering, such as vascularization for self-healing and self-cooling materials for aircraft, and tree fins and cavities for heat transfer enhancement.

The Scientific Network of Integrated Systems, Design and Technology (ISDT) is an initiative that has been established to respond industrial needs for integration of "Knowledge Technology" (KT) with multi- and inter-disciplinary applications. In particular the objective of ISDT is to incorporate multilateral engineering disciplines i.e. Composite-, Automotive-, Industrial- , Control- and Micro-Electronics Engineering, and derive knowledge for design and development of innovative product and services. In this context, the discourse of KT is established to address effective use of Knowledge Management, Semantic Technology, Information Systems and Software Engineering towards evolution of adaptive and intelligent systems for industrial applications. This carefully edited book presents the results of the latest ISDT meeting with special involvement of leading researchers and industries whose contributions are presented in the book chapters. This book consists of three main chapters namely: * Chapter 1: Applied Knowledge Management in Practice * Chapter 2: Semantic Technologies for Industrial Management and Process Controlling * Chapter 3: Knowledge Driven Approaches for Product Engineering Each article presents a unique in-progress research with respect to the target goal of improving our common understanding of KT integration and promoting further researches and cooperation in future.

This book is a collection of articles presented by researchers and practitioners, including engineers, biologists, health professionals and informatics/computer scientists, interested in both theoretical advances and applications of information systems, artificial intelligence, signal processing, electronics and other engineering tools in areas related to biology and medicine in the All India Seminar on Biomedical Engineering 2012 (AISOBE 2012), organized by The Institution of Engineers (India), Jabalpur Local Centre, Jabalpur, India during November 3-4, 2012. The content of the book is useful to doctors, engineers, researchers and academicians as well as industry professionals.

The aim of the book is to be a reference book in automotive technology, as far as automotive chassis (i.e. everything that is inside a vehicle except the engine and the body) is concerned. The book is a result of a decade of work heavily sponsored by the FIAT group (who supplied material, together with other automotive companies, and sponsored the work). The first volume deals with the design of automotive components and the second volume treats the various aspects of the design of a vehicle as a system.

In this book, Hanadi Mubarak, Ali Husain and Michael promote the concept of innovation incubators from a business-management perspective. The book provides a comprehensive roadmap for the development of new economies based on technology, as well as value added in technology transfer, innovation development and an entrepreneurial climate. Many books on innovation and entrepreneurship take a theoretical approach, presenting a selection of examples that may not reflect reality. However, this compendium of innovation and entrepreneurship case studies is based on the practical experience of executives and managers regarding the undertaking of projects within their industry and company. It is this practical approach, emphasizing enterprise-wide projects as a consequence of the current economic reality that differentiates this book from conventional texts on innovation and entrepreneurship. This investigation uses successful international case studies based on models in developed and developing countries. It argues that innovation incubators must be adopted by Arab countries to support diversification of their economies, the commercialization of new technologies, job creation and foster an entrepreneurial climate. The book presents research and case studies, which provide new insights into practices for undertaking projects that both executive and project managers will find interesting and useful for the advancement of their enterprises, particularly in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship.

In the last few years, a significant increase in applications of MMCs has taken place, particularly in the areas of automotive, aerospace, electronics, and recreation. These include continuous fiber reinforced MMCs for cables in power transmission, high temperature superconducting wires, particulate MMCs in civilian aircraft and automotive applications, and high volume fraction, high thermal conductivity substrates for electronic packaging. Nevertheless, as with any novel material systems, there is a lack of fundamental understanding on the part of practicing engineers and designers. This book would seek to address these issues, in a thorough and cohesive manner, as well as to provide students and scientists with a basic understanding of MMCs. This book will emphasize the synergistic relationships among processing, structure, and properties of metal matrix composites.

Changing world market conditions have forced manufacturers to apply new architectures and technologies for the design and control of manufacturing systems. Distributed Manufacturing: Paradigm, Concepts, Solutions and Examples outlines the current requirements of manufacturing systems and addresses the architectures, methodologies, and technologies developed within European research activities in response to these requirements. Distributed Manufacturing: Paradigm, Concepts, Solutions and Examples will be of interest to researchers and developers in all fields involving industrial control systems, as well as to decision-makers within industry and government organizations. The reader will gain a detailed knowledge of the current research directions in industrial control, reaching a comprehensive understanding of current advances, their expected benefits and limitations, and the possible consequences for industrial businesses.

Effective Functional Verification is organized into 4 parts. The first part contains 3 chapters designed appeal to newcomers and experienced people to the field. There is a survey of various verification methodologies and a discussion of them. The second part with 3 chapters is targeted towards people in management and higher up on the experience ladders. New verification engineers reading these chapters learn what is expected and how things work in verification. Some case studies are also presented with analysis of proposed improvements. The last two parts are the result of experience of several years. It goes into how to optimize a verification plan and an environment and how to get results effectively. Various subjects are discussed here to get the most out of a verification environment. Lastely, the appendix discusses some tool specifics to help remove repetitive work and also some tool specific guidelines. While reading Effective Functional Verification, one will be able to get a jump start on planning and executing a verification plan using the concepts presented.

Nowadays, engineering systems are of ever-increasing complexity and must be c- sidered asmultidisciplinary systems composed of interacting subsystems or system components from different engineering disciplines. Thus, an integration of various engineering disciplines, e.g, mechanical, electrical and control engineering in ac- current design approach is required. With regard to the systematic development and analysis of system models,interdisciplinary computer aided methodologies are - coming more and more important. A graphical description formalism particularly suited for multidisciplinary s- tems arebondgraphs devised by Professor Henry Paynter in as early as 1959 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and in use since then all over the world. This monograph is devoted exclusively to the bond graph methodology. It gives a comprehensive, in-depth, state-of-the-art presentation including recent results sc- tered over research articles and dissertations and research contributions by the - thor to a number of topics. The book systematically covers the fundamentals of developing bond graphs and deriving mathematical models from them, the recent developments in meth- ology, symbolic and numerical processing of mathematical models derived from bond graphs. Additionally it discusses modern modelling languages, the paradigm of object-oriented modelling, modern software that can be used for building and for processing of bond graph models, and provides a chapter with small case studies illustrating various applications of the methodology.

7. 1. 1 Background Uncertainty can be considered as the lack of adequate information to make a decision. It is important to quantify uncertainties in mathematical models used for design and optimization of nondeterministic engineering systems. In general, - certainty can be broadly classi?ed into three types (Bae et al. 2004; Ha-Rok 2004; Klir and Wierman 1998; Oberkampf and Helton 2002; Sentz 2002). The ?rst one is aleatory uncertainty (also referred to as stochastic uncertainty or inherent - certainty) - it results from the fact that a system can behave in random ways. For example, the failure of an engine can be modeled as an aleatory uncertaintybecause the failure can occur at a random time. One cannot predict exactly when the engine will fail even if a large quantity of failure data is gathered (available). The second one is epistemic uncertainty (also known as subjective uncertainty or reducible - certainty) - it is the uncertainty of the outcome of some random event due to lack of knowledge or information in any phase or activity of the modeling process. By gaining information about the system or environmental factors, one can reduce the epistemic uncertainty. For example, a lack of experimental data to characterize new materials and processes leads to epistemic uncertainty.

Design, development and life-cycle management of any electromechanical product is a complex task that requires a cross-functional team spanning multiple organizations, including design, manufacturing, and service. Ineffective design techniques, combined with poor communication between various teams, often leads to delays in product launches, with last minute design compromises and changes. The purpose of Design of Electromechanical Products: A Systems Approach is to provide a practical set of guidelines and best practices for driving world-class design, development, and sustainability of electromechanical products. The information provided within this text is applicable across the entire span of product life-cycle management, from initial concept work to the detailed design, analysis, and development stages, and through to product support and end-of-life. It is intended for professional engineers, designers, and technical managers, and provides a gateway to developing a product's design history file ("DHF") and device aster record ("DMR"). These tools enable design engineers to communicate a product's design, manufacturability, and service procedures with various cross-functional teams.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut The ?ow of academic ideas in the area of computational intelligence has penetrated industry with tremendous speed and persistence. Thousands of applications have proved the practical potential of fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary com- tation, swarm intelligence, and intelligent agents even before their theoretical foundation is completely understood. And the popularity is rising. Some software vendors have pronounced the new machine learning gold rush to "Transfer Data into Gold". New buzzwords like "data mining", "genetic algorithms", and "swarm optimization" have enriched the top executives' vocabulary to make them look more "visionary" for the 21st century. The phrase "fuzzy math" became political jargon after being used by US President George W. Bush in one of the election debates in the campaign in 2000. Even process operators are discussing the perf- mance of neural networks with the same passion as the performance of the Dallas Cowboys. However, for most of the engineers and scientists introducing computational intelligence technologies into practice, looking at the growing number of new approaches, and understanding their theoretical principles and potential for value creation becomes a more and more dif?cult task.

Embedded System Design: Modeling, Synthesis and Verification introduces a model-based approach to system level design. It presents modeling techniques for both computation and communication at different levels of abstraction, such as specification, transaction level and cycle-accurate level. It discusses synthesis methods for system level architectures, embedded software and hardware components. Using these methods, designers can develop applications with high level models, which are automatically translatable to low level implementations. This book, furthermore, describes simulation-based and formal verification methods that are essential for achieving design confidence. The book concludes with an overview of existing tools along with a design case study outlining the practice of embedded system design. Specifically, this book addresses the following topics in detail: . System modeling at different abstraction levels . Model-based system design . Hardware/Software codesign . Software and Hardware component synthesis . System verification This book is for groups within the embedded system community: students in courses on embedded systems, embedded application developers, system designers and managers, CAD tool developers, design automation, and system engineering.

Modern design methods of Automotive Cam Design require the computation of a range of parameters. This book provides a logical sequence of steps for the derivation of the relevant equations from first principles, for the more widely used cam mechanisms. Although originally derived for use in high performance engines, this work is equally applicable to the design of mass produced automotive and other internal combustion engines. This work may also be applicable for cams used in other areas such as printing and packaging machinery. Introduction to Analytical Methods for Internal Combustion Engine Cam Mechanisms provides the equations necessary for the design of cam lift curves with an associated smooth acceleration curve. The equations are derived for the kinematics and kinetics of all the mechanisms considered, together with those for cam curvature and oil entrainment velocity. This permits the cam shape, all loads and contact stresses to be evaluated, and the relevant tribology to be assessed. The effects of asymmetry on the manufacture of cams for finger follower and offset translating curved followers is described, and methods for transformation of cam shape data to that for a radial translating follower are given. This permits the manufacture and inspection by a wider range of CNC machines. The calculation of unsteady camshaft torques is described and an outline given for evaluation of the components for the lower engine orders. Although the theory, use and design, of reactive pendulum dampers are well documented elsewhere, these subjects have also been considered for completeness. The final chapter presents analysis of push rod mechanisms, including a four bar chain mechanism, which is more robust Written both as a reference for practising automotive design and development Engineers, and a text book for automotive engineering students, Introduction to Analytical Methods for Internal Combustion Engine Cam Mechanisms gives readers a thorough introduction into the design of automotive cam mechanisms, including much material not previously published.

This is a new type of edited volume in the Frontiers in Electronic Testing book series devoted to recent advances in electronic circuits testing. The book is a comprehensive elaboration on important topics which capture major research and development efforts today. "Hot" topics of current interest to test technology community have been selected, and the authors are key contributors in the corresponding topics.

In the industrial design and engineering field, product lifecycle, product development, design process, Design for X, etc., constitute only a small sample of terms related to the generation of quality products. Current best practices cover widely different knowledge domains in trying to exploit them to the best advantage, individually and in synergy. Moreover, standards become increasingly more helpful in interfacing these domains and they are enlarging their coverage by going beyond the single domain boundary to connect closely different aspects of the product lifecycle. The degree of complexity of each domain makes impossible the presence of multipurpose competencies and skills; there is almost always the need for interacting and integrating people and resources in some effective way. These are the best conditions for the birth of theories, methodologies, models, architectures, systems, procedures, algorithms, software packages, etc., in order to help in some way the synergic work of all the actors involved in the product lifecycle. This brief introduction contains all the main themes developed in this book, starting from the analysis of the design and engineering scenarios to arrive at the development and adoption of a framework for product design and process reconfiguration. In fact, the core consists of the description of the Design GuideLines Collaborative Framework (DGLs-CF), a methodological approach that generates a collaborative environment where designers, manufacturers and inspectors can find the right and effective meeting point to share their knowledge and skills in order to contribute to the optimum generation of quality products.

The work contains the results of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing Systems and Technology - AMST'02, which was held in Udine in June 2002. It presents up-to-date information on the latest developments - research results and experience - in the field of machining of conventional and advanced materials, machine tools and flexible manufacturing systems, forming, nonconventional processes, robotics, measurement and control, quality, design and ecodesign, rapid prototyping, rapid tooling and manufacturing, materials and mechanics.

Industries and particularly the manufacturing sector have been facing difficult challenges in a context of socio-economic turbulence characterized by complexity as well as the speed of change in causal interconnections in the socio-economic environment. In order to respond to these challenges companies are forced to seek new technological and organizational solutions. In this context two main characteristics emerge as key properties of a modern automation system - agility and distribution. Agility because systems need not only to be flexible in order to adjust to a number of a-priori defined scenarios, but rather must cope with unpredictability. Distribution in the sense that automation and business processes are becoming distributed and supported by collaborative networks. Emerging Solutions for Future Manufacturing Systems includes the papers selected for the BASYS'04 conference, which was held in Vienna, Austria in September 2004 and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2), which is defined as "an integrated industrial product and service offering that delivers value in use," has expanded rapidly over the last decade. IPS2 has allowed us to achieve both high added value and high productivity and has enriched our QOL by improving the performance of products and services. We are now struggling with many awkward issues related to sustainability, but IPS2 is expected to be the "philosopher's stone" for solving these issues. Following the pattern of conferences held in Cranfield in 2009, Linkoeping in 2010, and Braunschweig in 2011, the fourth International CIRP Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems, held on November 8-9, 2012, in Tokyo, will cover various aspects of IPS2. Topics planned for this year's conference reflect the latest IPS2 information in both the natural sciences and humanities and include case studies from various industries. IPS2 is still a relatively new field, so it is important to keep track of the entire context in order to promote more cross-sectional cooperation between multimodal fields and disciplines. The fourth International CIRP Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems will serve as a vital platform for such collaborations and the discussion of new scientific ideas.

This book presents the results of several years' research work on how to characterize complexity in engineering design with a specific regard to dependency modeling. The 52 complexity metrics that are presented show different facets of how complexity takes shape in design processes. The metrics are supported by a modeling method and a measurement framework to employ the metrics in a goal-oriented manner. The detailed description of all involved metrics and models makes it possible to apply the analysis approach to common process modeling methodologies. Three case studies from automotive process management illustrate the application to facilitate the transfer to other cases in an industrial context. The comprehensive appendix supplies additional details and checklists for structural analysis to generate a complete overview of current means of structural analysis.

Functional verification is an art as much as a science. It requires not only creativity and cunning, but also a clear methodology to approach the problem. The Open Verification Methodology (OVM) is a leading-edge methodology for verifying designs at multiple levels of abstraction. It brings together ideas from electrical, systems, and software engineering to provide a complete methodology for verifying large scale System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. OVM defines an approach for developing testbench architectures so they are modular, configurable, and reusable. This book is designed to help both novice and experienced verification engineers master the OVM through extensive examples. It describes basic verification principles and explains the essentials of transaction-level modeling (TLM). It leads readers from a simple connection of a producer and a consumer through complete self-checking testbenches. It explains construction techniques for building configurable, reusable testbench components and how to use TLM to communicate between them. Elements such as agents and sequences are explained in detail.

This book deals with the analysis, the design and the implementation of the mechatronic systems. Classical and modern tools are developed for the analysis and the design for such systems. Robust control, H-Infinity and guaranteed cost control theory are also used for analysis and design of mechatronic systems. Different controller such as state feedback, static output feedback and dynamic output feedback controllers are used to stabilize mechatronic systems. Heuristic algorithms are provided to solve the design of the classical controller such as PID, phase lead, phase lag and phase lead-lag controllers while linear matrix inequalities (LMI) algorithms are provided for finding solutions to the state feedback, static output feedback and dynamic output feedback controllers. The theory presented in the different chapters of the volume is applied to numerical examples to show the usefulness of the theoretical results. Some case studies are also provided to show how the developed concepts apply for real system. Emphasis is also put on the implementation in real-time for some real systems that we have developed in our mechatronic laboratory and all the detail is provided to give an idea to the reader how to implement its own mechatronic system. Mechatronics Systems: Analysis, Design and Implementation is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in mechatronic system and control theory and as a reference for academic researchers in control or mathematics with interest in control theory. The reader should have completed first-year graduate courses in control theory, linear algebra, and linear systems. It will also be of great value to engineers practising in fields where the systems can be modeled by linear time invariant systems.