Photovoltaics, the direct conversion of sunlight to electricity, is now the fastest growing technology for electricity generation. Present "first generation" products use the same silicon wafers as in microelectronics. "Second generation" thin-films, now entering the market, have the potential to greatly improve the economics by eliminating material costs. Martin Green, one of the worlds foremost photovoltaic researchers, argues in this book that "second generation" photovoltaics will eventually reach its own material cost constraints, engendering a "third generation" of high performance thin-films. The book explores, self-consistently, the energy conversion potential of advanced approaches for improving photovoltaic performance and outlines possible implementation paths.

By outlining a new design or the Kuroshio power plant, new approaches to turbine design, anchorage system planning, deep sea marine engineering and power plant operations and maintenance are explored and suggested. The impact on the local environment, particularly in the face of natural disasters, is also considered to provide a well rounded introduction to plan and build a 30MW pilot power plant. Following a literature review, the six chapters of this book propose a conceptual design by focusing on the plant's core technologies and establish the separate analysis logics for turbine design and the relay platforms. This is tempered against the ecological impact of both the construction and operation of the plant. These proposed technologies and plans can be further applied to power generation in other waters such as the Gulf Stream, the East Australian Current the Humboldt Current and the East Africa Coastal Current. Engineers, students and industry professionals are provided with a solid introduction to power plant technology as well as a design with specific real world applications

Vibration of Hydraulic Machinery deals with the vibration problem which has significant influence on the safety and reliable operation of hydraulic machinery. It provides new achievements and the latest developments in these areas, even in the basic areas of this subject. The present book covers the fundamentals of mechanical vibration and rotordynamics as well as their main numerical models and analysis methods for the vibration prediction. The mechanical and hydraulic excitations to the vibration are analyzed, and the pressure fluctuations induced by the unsteady turbulent flow is predicted in order to obtain the unsteady loads. This book also discusses the loads, constraint conditions and the elastic and damping characters of the mechanical system, the structure dynamic analysis, the rotor dynamic analysis and the system instability of hydraulic machines, including the illustration of monitoring system for the instability and the vibration in hydraulic units. All the problems are necessary for vibration prediction of hydraulic machinery.

This book highlights selected papers from the Mechanical Engineering track, with a focus on mechatronics and manufacturing, presented at the "Malaysian Technical Universities Conference on Engineering and Technology" (MUCET 2019). The conference brings together researchers and professionals in the fields of engineering, research and technology, providing a platform for future collaborations and the exchange of ideas.

The DARPA Grand Challenge was a landmark in the field of robotics: a race by autonomous vehicles through 132 miles of rough Nevada terrain. It showcased exciting and unprecedented capabilities in robotic perception, navigation, and control. The event took place in October 2005 and drew teams of competitors from academia and industry, as well as many garage hobbyists. This book presents fifteen technical papers that describe each team's driverless vehicle, race strategy, and insights. As a whole, they present the state of the art in autonomous vehicle technology and offer a glimpse of future technology for tomorrow 's driverless cars.

This book explores the use of nanomaterials as diesel fuel additives. It extensively reviews the diesel engine characteristics and the most frequently used nanomaterials and nanofuels and discusses the practical issues regarding the viability of nanomaterials as fuel additives from technical, environmental, and human health viewpoints. Special attention is focused on questions related to the short-term use of nanomaterials in diesel engines, such as: * What are the most important nanomaterial activities in diesel engines? * What happens to nanomaterials at various stages, from the fuel tank to exhaust? * What are the effects of nanofuel usage on diesel engine characteristics? and * What are the effects of nanomaterials on diesel engine parts and systems? Given its scope, this book is a valuable resource for researchers and engineers in environmental science, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering fields, as well as for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Heat transfer enhancement in single-phase and two-phase flow heat exchangers in important in such industrial applications as power generating plant, process and chemical industry, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration systems, and the cooling of electronic equipment. Energy savings are of primary importance in the design of such systems, leading to more efficient, environmentally friendly devices. This book provides invaluable information for such purposes.

This book is essential for anyone involved in the design of high-performance heat exchangers or heat devices, also known as "second generation heat transfer technology." Enhanced surfaces are geometrics with special shapes that promote much higher rates of heat transfer than smooth or plain surfaces. This revision presents the subject matter just beyond the introductory level and traces the advancement of heat transfer research in areas such as integral-fin and micro-fin tubes, complex plate-fin geometries, and micro-channels for single-phase and two-phase applications.

The VETOMAC-X Conference covered a holistic plethora of relevant topics in vibration and engineering technology including condition monitoring, machinery and structural dynamics, rotor dynamics, experimental techniques, finite element model updating, industrial case studies, vibration control and energy harvesting, and signal processing. These proceedings contain not only all of the nearly one-hundred peer-reviewed presentations from authors representing more than twenty countries, but also include six invited lectures from renowned experts: Professor K. Gupta, Mr W. Hahn, Professor A.W. Lees, Professor John Mottershead, Professor J.S. Rao, and Dr P. Russhard. This work is of interest to researchers and practitioners alike, and is an essential book for most of libraries of higher academic institutes.

With regard to both the environmental sustainability and operating efficiency demands, modern combustion research has to face two main objectives, the optimization of combustion efficiency and the reduction of pollutants. This book reports on the combustion research activities carried out within the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 568 Flow and Combustion in Future Gas Turbine Combustion Chambers funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This aimed at designing a completely integrated modeling and numerical simulation of the occurring very complex, coupled and interacting physico-chemical processes, such as turbulent heat and mass transport, single or multi-phase flows phenomena, chemical reactions/combustion and radiation, able to support the development of advanced gas turbine chamber concepts"

This book describes how to make two vertical and two horizontal copper boilers with a capacity of less than three-bar litres. All four boilers are heated with liquid petroleum gas (LPG) contained in small refillable or disposable tanks. With over 285 colour photographs and diagrams, it includes the tools and equipment required, together with important safety considerations; how to work the various materials to make the necessary parts; step-by-step instructions on the technique of silver solder; the testing regime; a review of various sizes and shapes of gas burners and how to connect them; instructions for building replacements for the well-known Verto boiler, a vertical boat boiler, a portable-engine boiler and a Cornish boiler with Galloway tubes. Finally, there is guidance on the efficient operation and essential maintenance of steam boilers and safety calculations and a list of useful contacts.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 12th IFToMM International Symposium on Science of Mechanisms and Machines (SYROM 2017), that was held in "Gheorghe Asachi" Technical University of Iasi, Romania, November 02-03, 2017. It contains applications of mechanisms in several modern technical fields such as mechatronics and robotics, biomechanics, machines and apparatus. The book presents original high-quality contributions on topics related to mechanisms within aspects of theory, design, practice and applications in engineering, including but not limited to: theoretical kinematics, computational kinematics, mechanism design, experimental mechanics, mechanics of robots, dynamics of machinery, dynamics of multi-body systems, control issues of mechanical systems, mechanisms for biomechanics, novel designs, mechanical transmissions, linkages and manipulators, micro-mechanisms, teaching methods, history of mechanism science, industrial and non-industrial applications. In connection with these fields, the book combines the theoretical results with experimental tests.

This book considers the behavior of fluids in a low-gravity environment (e.g. spacecraft) with special emphasis on application in PMD (propellant management device) systems. Since PMD designs are not testable on ground and thus completely rely on analytical or numerical concepts, this book treats three different flow problems with analytical, numerical and experimental means. These problems are linked together by the same set of equations and boundary conditions.

Rapid developments in the field precipitated by the increased demand for clean burner systems have rendered much of the published literature outdated. With the Industrial Burners Handbook, best-selling author, editor, and combustion expert Charles Baukal, Jr. fills this gap. This handbook is a comprehensive reference dedicated to the design and applications of industrial burners. In addition to a solid introduction to combustion and burner fundamentals, an outstanding panel of contributing authors address all major burner types and explore a range of topics never before adequately covered in a handbook, including noise, burner controls, and physical modeling.

This book consists of peer-reviewed articles and reviews presented as lectures at the Sixth International Symposium on Thermal Engineering and Sciences for Cold Regions in Darmstadt, Germany. It addresses all relevant aspects of thermal physics and engineering in cold regions, such as the Arctic regions. These environments present many unique freezing and melting phenomena and the relevant heat and mass transfer processes are of basic importance with respect to both the technological applications and the natural context in which they occur. Intended for physicists, engineers, geoscientists, climatologists and cryologists alike, these proceedings cover topics such as: ice formation and decay, heat conduction with phase change, convection with freezing and melting, thermal properties at low temperature, frost heave and permafrost, climate impact in cold regions, thermal design of structures, bio-engineering in cold regions, and many more.

This superb text describes a novel and powerful method for allowing design engineers to firstly model a linear problem in heat conduction, then build a solution in an explicit form and finally obtain a numerical solution. It constitutes a modelling and calculation tool based on a very efficient and systemic methodological approach.
Solving the heat equations through integral transforms does not constitute a new subject. However, finding a solution generally constitutes only one part of the problem. In design problems, an initial thermal design has to be tested through the calculation of the temperature or flux field, followed by an analysis of this field in terms of constraints. A modified design is then proposed, followed by a new thermal field calculation, and so on until the right design is found. The thermal quadrupole method allows this often painful iterative procedure to be removed by allowing only one calculation.
The chapters in this book increase in complexity from a rapid presentation of the method for one dimensional transient problems in chapter one, to non uniform boundary conditions or inhomogeneous media in chapter six. In addition, a wide range of corrected problems of contemporary interest are presented mainly in chapters three and six with their numerical implementation in MATLAB (r) language. This book covers the whole scope of linear problems and presents a wide range of concrete issues of contemporary interest such as harmonic excitations of buildings, transfer in composite media, thermal contact resistance and moving material heat transfer. Extensions of this method to coupled transfers in a semi-transparent medium and to mass transfer in porous media are considered respectively in chapters seven and eight. Chapter nine is devoted to practical numerical methods that can be used to inverse the Laplace transform.
Written from an engineering perspective, with applications to real engineering problems, this book will be of significant interest not only to researchers, lecturers and graduate students in mechanical engineering (thermodynamics) and process engineers needing to model a heat transfer problem to obtain optimized operating conditions, but also to researchers interested in the simulation or design of experiments where heat transfer play a significant role.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the First International Congress for the Advancement of Mechanism, Machine, Robotics and Mechatronics Sciences (ICAMMRMS-2017), held in Beirut, Lebanon, October 2017. The book consists of twenty papers in six different fields covering multiple angles of machine and robotics sciences: mechanical design, control, structural synthesis, vibration study, and manufacturing. This volume is of interest to mechanical as well as electrical engineers.

This book introduces a paradigm of reverse hypothesis machines (RHM), focusing on knowledge innovation and machine learning. Knowledge- acquisition -based learning is constrained by large volumes of data and is time consuming. Hence Knowledge innovation based learning is the need of time. Since under-learning results in cognitive inabilities and over-learning compromises freedom, there is need for optimal machine learning. All existing learning techniques rely on mapping input and output and establishing mathematical relationships between them. Though methods change the paradigm remains the same-the forward hypothesis machine paradigm, which tries to minimize uncertainty. The RHM, on the other hand, makes use of uncertainty for creative learning. The approach uses limited data to help identify new and surprising solutions. It focuses on improving learnability, unlike traditional approaches, which focus on accuracy. The book is useful as a reference book for machine learning researchers and professionals as well as machine intelligence enthusiasts. It can also used by practitioners to develop new machine learning applications to solve problems that require creativity.

SYROM conferences have been organized since 1973 by the Romanian branch of the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanisms and Machine Science IFToMM, Year by year the event grew in quality. Now in its 10th edition, international visibility and recognition among the researchers active in the mechanisms science field has been achieved.

SYROM 2009 brought together researchers and academic staff from the field of mechanisms and machine science from all over the world and served as a forum for presenting the achievements and most recent results in research and education. Topics treated include conceptual design, kinematics and dynamics, modeling and simulation, synthesis and optimization, command and control, current trends in education in this field, applications in high-tech products.

The papers presented at this conference were subjected to a peer-review process to ensure the quality of the paper, the engineering significance, the soundness of results and the originality of the paper. The accepted papers fulfill these criteria and make the proceedings unique among the publications of this type.

"Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions" presents the discussion of the most recent advances in intelligent human-computer interaction, including fascinating new study findings on talk-in-interaction, which is the province of conversation analysis, a subfield in sociology/sociolinguistics, a new and emerging area in natural language understanding. Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation natural language technologies for practical speech processing applications that serve the consumer's need for well-functioning natural language-driven personal assistants and other mobile devices, while also addressing business' need for better functioning IVR-driven call centers that yield a more satisfying experience for the caller. This anthology is aimed at two distinct audiences: one consisting of speech engineers and system developers; the other comprised of linguists and cognitive scientists. The text builds on the experience and knowledge of each of these audiences by exposing them to the work of the other.

This book presents the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of IFToMM ITALY, held online on September 9-11, 2020. It includes peer-reviewed papers on the latest advances in mechanism and machine science, discussing topics such as biomechanical engineering, computational kinematics, the history of mechanism and machine science, gearing and transmissions, multi-body dynamics, robotics and mechatronics, the dynamics of machinery, tribology, vibrations, rotor dynamics and vehicle dynamics. A valuable, up-to-date resource, it offers an essential overview of the subject for scientists and practitioners alike, and will inspire further investigations and research.

Mechatronics is a synergic discipline integrating precise mechanics, electrotechnics, electronics and IT technologies. The main goal of mechatronical approach to design of complex products is to achieve new quality of their utility value at reasonable price. Successful accomplishment of this task would not be possible without application of advanced software and hardware tools for simulation of design, technologies and production control and also for simulation of behavior of these products in order to provide the highest possible level of spatial and functional integration of the final product.

This book brings a review of the current state of the art in mechatronics, as presented at the 8th International Conference Mechatronics 2009, organized by the Brno Technical University, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Czech Republic. The specific topics of the conference are Modelling and Simulation, Metrology & Diagnostics, Sensorics & Photonics, Control & Robotics, MEMS Design & Mechatronic Products, Production Machines and Biomechanics. The selected contributions provide an insight into the current development of these scientific disciplines, present the new results of research and development and indicate the trends of development in the interdisciplinary field of mechatronic systems. Therefore, the book provides the latest and helpful information both for the R&D specialists and for the designers working in mechatronics and related fields.

Failure of components or systems must be prevented by both designers and operators of systems, but knowledge of the underlying mechanisms is often lacking. Since the relation between the expected usage of a system and its failure behavior is unknown, unexpected failures often occur, with possibly serious financial and safety consequences. Principles of Loads and Failure Mechanisms. Applications in Maintenance, Reliability and Design provides a complete overview of all relevant failure mechanisms, ranging from mechanical failures like fatigue and creep to corrosion and electric failures. Both qualitative and quantitative descriptions of the mechanisms and their governing loads enable a solid assessment of a system's reliability in a given or assumed operational context. Moreover, a unique range of applications of this knowledge in the fields of maintenance, reliability and design are presented. The benefits of understanding the physics of failure are demonstrated for subjects like condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, prognostics and health management, failure analysis and reliability engineering. Finally, the role of these mechanisms in design processes and design for maintenance are illustrated.

Computational Optimization of Internal Combustion Engines presents the state of the art of computational models and optimization methods for internal combustion engine development using multi-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools and genetic algorithms. Strategies to reduce computational cost and mesh dependency are discussed, as well as regression analysis methods. Several case studies are presented in a section devoted to applications, including assessments of: spark-ignition engines, dual-fuel engines, heavy duty and light duty diesel engines. Through regression analysis, optimization results are used to explain complex interactions between engine design parameters, such as nozzle design, injection timing, swirl, exhaust gas recirculation, bore size, and piston bowl shape. Computational Optimization of Internal Combustion Engines demonstrates that the current multi-dimensional CFD tools are mature enough for practical development of internal combustion engines. It is written for researchers and designers in mechanical engineering and the automotive industry.

Gas-Turbine Regenerators begins with a thorough introduction to regenerators, familiarizing the reader with the terminology used in regenerator analysis and design. The book then describes the historical background of regenerator analysis and design and their development through the years. Following the historical background, this book explores gas-turbine cycles, the thermodynamic cycle by which gas turbines convert heat into work. The book then presents three design models: Direct Regenerator Design; Optimal Regenerator Design, and the design methods of Kays and London. The text concludes with three significant kinds of regenerator performance: heat transfer; leakage, and pressure drops. Regenerative gas turbines have the potential to be more efficient and lower in cost than competing diesel and combined cycle engines. In addition, regenerative gas turbines require less maintenance, require less space, and pollute less than competitive systems. This text provides engineers and designers with the tools needed to achieve these qualities in four distinct ways: First, in the preliminary stages, designers can choose from one or more designs that may be suitable for their application. Second, the designer who has some design specifications can use the optimization method to choose the remaining specifications in order to provide maximum thermal efficiency. Third, this book can be used by the manufacturer of regenerator cores in selecting core-passage geometrics and core materials. Finally, inexperienced designers can use the step-by-step examples of designs of regenerative gas turbines.