This book describes the design of microelectronic circuits for energy harvesting, broadband energy conversion, new methods and technologies for energy conversion. The author also discusses the design of power management circuits and the implementation of voltage regulators. Coverage includes advanced methods in low and high power electronics, as well as principles of micro-scale design based on piezoelectric, electromagnetic and thermoelectric technologies with control and conditioning circuit design.

The volumes includes selected and reviewed papers from the 1st ETA Conference on Energy and Thermal Management, Air Conditioning and Waste Heat Recovery in Berlin, December 1-2, 2016. Experts from university, public authorities and industry discuss the latest technological developments and applications for energy efficiency. Main focus is on automotive industry, rail and aerospace.

This book on the dynamics of rail vehicles is developed from the manuscripts for a class with the same name at TU Berlin. It is directed mainly to master students with pre-knowledge in mathematics and mechanics and engineers that want to learn more. The important phenomena of the running behaviour of rail vehicles are derived and explained. Also recent research results and experience from the operation of rail vehicles are included. One focus is the description of the complex wheel-rail contact phenomena that are essential to understand the concept of running stability and curving. A reader should in the end be able to understand the background of simulation tools that are used by the railway industry and universities today.

This book concisely describes the architecture of the oil and gas pipelines in the Black-Caspian Seas Region and analyzes the status quo and perspectives of oil and gas production in this region. The authors present numerous projects, each of which has made a substantial contribution to the development of pipeline transport and transit in this part of the world, and discuss them in detail. The topics covered include: the region's geographic characteristics; the region's hydrocarbon potential; Russian and EU policy on pipeline transport; Kazakhstan's pipeline policy; Chinese pipeline projects; the Bulgarian gas transmission system; environmental risks in the production and transportation of hydrocarbons; satellite monitoring; and subsea leak detection. This volume offers a valuable resource for politicians, specialists in the oil and gas business, decision-makers, and environmentalists alike.

This edited volume discuses urban transport issues, policies, and initiatives in twelve of the world's major emerging economies - Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and Vietnam - countries with large populations that have recently experienced large changes in urban structure, motorization and all the associated social, economic, and environmental impacts in positive and negative senses. Contributions on each of these twelve countries focus on one or more major cities per country. This book aims to fill a gap in the transport literature that is crucial to understanding the needs of a large portion of the world's urban population, especially in view of the southward shift in economic power. Readers will develop a better understanding of urban transport problems and policies in nations where development levels are below those of richer countries (mainly in the northern hemisphere) but where the rate of economic growth is often increasing at a faster rate than the wealthiest nations.

This book outlines issues related to massive integration of electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles into power grids. Electricity is becoming the preferred energy vector for the next new generation of road vehicles. It is widely acknowledged that road vehicles based on full electric or hybrid drives can mitigate problems related to fossil fuel dependence. This book explains the emerging and understanding of storage systems for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. The recharging stations for these types of vehicles might represent a great advantage for the electric grid by facilitating integration of renewable and distributed energy production. This book presents a broad review from analyzing current literature to on-going research projects about the new power technologies related to the various charging architectures for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. Specifically focusing on DC fast charging operations, as well as, grid-connected power converters and the full range of energy storage systems. These key components are analyzed for distributed generation and charging system integration into micro-grids. The authors demonstrate that these storage systems represent effective interfaces for the control and management of renewable and sustainable distributed energy resources. New standards and applications are emerging from micro-grid pilot projects around the world and case studies demonstrate the convenience and feasibility of distributed energy management. The material in this unique volume discusses potential avenues for further research toward achieving more reliable, more secure and cleaner energy.

This book explores the opportunities and challenges of the sharing economy and innovative transportation technologies with regard to urban mobility. Written by government experts, social scientists, technologists and city planners from North America, Europe and Australia, the papers in this book address the impacts of demographic, societal and economic trends and the fundamental changes arising from the increasing automation and connectivity of vehicles, smart communication technologies, multimodal transit services, and urban design. The book is based on the Disrupting Mobility Summit held in Cambridge, MA (USA) in November 2015, organized by the City Science Initiative at MIT Media Lab, the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, the LSE Cities at the London School of Economics and Politics and the Innovation Center for Mobility and Societal Change in Berlin.

In this new fifth edition, there is a strong focus on the increasing concern over infrastructure resilience from the threat of serious storms, human activity, and population growth. The new edition also looks technologies that urban transportation planners are increasingly focused on, such as vehicle to vehicle communications and driver-less cars, which have the potential to radically improve transportation. This book also investigates the effects of transportation on the health of travelers and the general public, and the ways in which these concerns have become additional factors in the transportation and infrastructure planning and policy process. The development of U.S. urban transportation policy over the past half-century illustrates the changing relationships among federal, state, and local governments. This comprehensive text examines the evolution of urban transportation planning from early developments in highway planning in the 1930s to today's concerns over sustainable development, security, and pollution control. Highlighting major national events, the book examines the influence of legislation, regulations, conferences, federal programs, and advances in planning procedures and technology. The volume provides in-depth coverage of the most significant event in transportation planning, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, which created a federal mandate for a comprehensive urban transportation planning process, carried out cooperatively by states and local governments with federal funding. Claiming that urban transportation planning is more sophisticated, costly, and complex than its highway and transit planning predecessors, the book demonstrates how urban transportation planning evolved in response to changes in such factors as the environment, energy, development patterns, intergovernmental coordination, and federal transit programs. This new edition includes analyses of the growing threats to infrastructure, new projects in infrastructure resilience, the promise of new technologies to improve urban transportation, and the recent shifts in U.S. transportation policy. This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in transportation legislation and policy, eco-justice, and regional and urban planning.

This edited monograph presents the selected papers from RailNewcastle 2016, being held in Newcastle UK, June 2016. The collected papers focus on railway research, including topics such as rail operations, engineering, logistics, communication systems and safety. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field of railway engineering, but the paper collection may also be beneficial for graduate students alike.

This book is a single-source guide to nonlinearity and nonlinear techniques in energy harvesting, with a focus on vibration energy harvesters for micro and nanoscale applications. The authors demonstrate that whereas nonlinearity was avoided as an undesirable phenomenon in early energy harvesters, now it can be used as an essential part of these systems. Readers will benefit from an overview of nonlinear techniques and applications, as well as deeper insight into methods of analysis and modeling of energy harvesters, employing different nonlinearities. The role of nonlinearity due to different aspects of an energy harvester is discussed, including nonlinearity due to mechanical-to-electrical conversion, nonlinearity due to conditioning electronic circuits, nonlinearity due to novel materials (e.g., graphene), etc. Coverage includes tutorial introductions to MEMS and NEMS technology, as well as a wide range of applications, such as nonlinear oscillators and transducers for energy harvesters and electronic conditioning circuits for effective energy processing.

In the era of big data, this book explores the new challenges of urban-rural planning and management from a practical perspective based on a multidisciplinary project. Researchers as contributors to this book have accomplished their projects by using big data and relevant data mining technologies for investigating the possibilities of big data, such as that obtained through cell phones, social network systems and smart cards instead of conventional survey data for urban planning support. This book showcases active researchers who share their experiences and ideas on human mobility, accessibility and recognition of places, connectivity of transportation and urban structure in order to provide effective analytic and forecasting tools for smart city planning and design solutions in China.

This book contains the papers presented at the 20th anniversary edition of the AMAA conference held in Brussels, Belgium in 2016. The theme of the conference was "Smart Systems for the Automobile of the Future". The automobile is currently being reshaped at unprecedented pace. Automation and electrification are the two dominant megatrends which dramatically change the choice and design of components, systems, vehicular architectures and ultimately the way we use cars in the coming decades. Novel E/E architectures, vehicular connectivity and cloud services will be key to extending the perception and decision-making horizons of automated vehicles, to enable cooperative functions and a seamless digital user experience. The AMAA's ongoing mission to detect novel trends in automotive ICT, electronics and smart systems and to discuss the technological implications is once again reflected in this volume. The book will be a valuable read for research experts and professionals in the automotive and smart systems industry but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

This book provides probabilistic, deterministic and geolocation-aware approaches for adaptive connectivity, robust security and privacy-aware communications for vehicular cyber physical systems (CPS). It presents mathematical models and numerical results obtained from experiments and simulations, and a trade-off between connectivity, security and privacy for vehicular communications. Connectivity between vehicles is crucial for vehicular CPS. Intelligent vehicular CPS provides not only road safety and traffic efficiency by exchanging information among vehicles, but also offers infotainment services to passengers using a variety of wireless technologies to forward the traffic/trajectory information with Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), and Vehicle-to-Roadside-to-Vehicle (V2R2V) communications. The book covers how to ensure that the message received from other vehicles is secure and trustworthy, rather than malicious. Further, it reveals how to make sure that the privacy of participants is not revealed while validating the received message. Researchers and professionals working with vehicular networks, smart systems, cyber physical systems, and mobile privacy will find this book valuable.

This thesis introduces a figure of merit for light trapping with photonic nanostructures and shows how different light trapping methods compare, irrespective of material, absorber thickness or type of nanostructure. It provides an overview of the essential aspects of light trapping, offering a solid basis for future designs. Light trapping with photonic nanostructures is a powerful method of increasing the absorption in thin film solar cells. Many light trapping methods have been studied, but to date there has been no comprehensive figure of merit to compare these different methods quantitatively. This comparison allows us to establish important design rules for highly performing structures; one such rule is the structuring of the absorber layer from both sides, for which the authors introduce a novel and simple layer-transfer technique. A closely related issue is the question of plasmonic vs. dielectric nanostructures; the authors present an experimental demonstration, aided by a detailed theoretical assessment, highlighting the importance of considering the multipass nature of light trapping in a thin film, which is an essential effect that has been neglected in previous work and which allows us to quantify the parasitic losses.

This book illustrates operation and maintenance practices/guidelines for economic generation and managing health of a thermal power generator beyond its regulatory life. The book provides knowledge for professionals managing power station operations, through its unique approach to chemical analysis of water, steam, oil etc. to identify malfunctioning/defects in equipment/systems much before the physical manifestation of the problem. The book also contains a detailed procedure for conducting performance evaluation tests on different equipment, and for analyzing test results for predicting maintenance requirements, which has lent a new dimension to power systems operation and maintenance practices. A number of real life case studies also enrich the book. This book will prove particularly useful to power systems operations professionals in the developing economies, and also to researchers and students involved in studying power systems operations and control.

This book presents the most important aspects of analysis of dynamical processes taking place on the human body surface. It provides an overview of the major devices that act as a prevention measure to boost a person's motivation for physical activity. A short overview of the most popular MEMS sensors for biomedical applications is given. The development and validation of a multi-level computational model that combines mathematical models of an accelerometer and reduced human body surface tissue is presented. Subsequently, results of finite element analysis are used together with experimental data to evaluate rheological properties of not only human skin but skeletal joints as well. Methodology of development of MOEMS displacement-pressure sensor and adaptation for real-time biological information monitoring, namely "ex vivo" and "in vitro" blood pulse type analysis, is described. Fundamental and conciliatory investigations, achieved knowledge and scientific experience about biologically adaptive multifunctional nanocomposite materials, their properties and synthesis compatibility, periodical microstructures, which may be used in various optical components for modern, productive sensors' formation technologies and their application in medicine, pharmacy industries and environmental monitoring, are presented and analyzed. This book also is aimed at research and development of vibrational energy harvester, which would convert ambient kinetic energy into electrical energy by means of the impact-type piezoelectric transducer. The book proposes possible prototypes of devices for non-invasive real-time artery pulse measurements and micro energy harvesting.

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

This book draws upon the expertise of academic researchers, urban planners and architects to explore the challenge of building the sustainable cities of the future. It addresses this challenge by considering current cities and those of the near future, and creates a picture of the sustainable city from the bottom up. Individual chapters cover topics such as transport, energy supply, sustainable urbanism and promoting social equality in large infrastructure projects. Real-world examples are presented to illustrate how systems thinking is used to integrate different components of a city so as to ensure that the whole is more sustainable than its parts. Written in an accessible style, this book is intended for general readers as much as it is for students and researchers interested in sustainable cities and related topics. It is also ideal for urban planners seeking best-practice guidelines for sustainable urban development.

Power Electrical Systems are an indespensable feature of the exploitation and diagnostics of elecrical machines and energy resources. The Volume presents extended and peer reviewed papers from the international conference on PES in Barcelona, 2014. Among the topics dealt with are: electrical machines design, voltage and control, automotive power drives, electromagnetic compatibility, monitoring and diagnostics, renewable energy systems. The International Conference on Power Electrical Systems (PES) is a forum for researchers and specialists in different fields of electrical engineering related to Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems (HRES); Power Electronics in Renewable Energy Systems; Topologies and Control of Power Electronics Converters Used in Renewable Energy Systems; Electric machines modelling and control; Automotive electrical systems; Electric machine design; Monitoring and diagnostics; Special machines; Power systems; Power electronic converters; Renewable energy systems; Variable speed drives; Electromagnetic compatibility; Variable speed generating systems; Transformers.

This book presents basic and advanced concepts for energy harvesting and energy efficiency, as well as related technologies, methods, and their applications. The book provides up-to-date knowledge and discusses the state-of-the-art equipment and methods used for energy harvesting and energy efficiency, combining theory and practical applications. Containing over 200 illustrations and problems and solutions, the book begins with overview chapters on the status quo in this field. Subsequent chapters introduce readers to advanced concepts and methods. In turn, the final part of the book is dedicated to technical strategies, efficient methods and applications in the field of energy efficiency, which also makes it of interest to technicians in industry. The book tackles problems commonly encountered using basic methods of energy harvesting and energy efficiency, and proposes advanced methods to resolve these issues. All the methods proposed have been validated through simulation and experimental results. These "hot topics" will continue to be of interest to scientists and engineers in future decades and will provide challenges to researchers around the globe as issues of climate change and changing energy policies become more pressing.Here, readers will find all the basic and advanced concepts they need. As such, it offers a valuable, comprehensive guide for all students and practicing engineers who wishing to learn about and work in these fields.

This book contributes a basic framework for and specific insights into interdisciplinary connections between production, logistics, and traffic subsystems. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which presents an overview of interdisciplinarity in value-added networks and freight traffic. This includes an introduction to the topic and a description of an integrated framework of production, logistics, and traffic. Furthermore, it describes the barriers and challenges of interdisciplinary decision-making and project management. In turn, the second part presents domain-specific perspectives on interdisciplinary decision support, exploring domain-specific challenges of interdisciplinary interfaces and requirements for management methods and instruments from the standpoint of production management, logistics management, traffic management, and information technologies.

This book describes the wave characteristics of contact lines taking wind into consideration and discusses new methods for detecting catenary geometry, pantograph slide fault, and catenary support system faults. It also introduces wire-irregularity detection methods for catenary estimation, and discusses modern spectrum estimation tools for catenary. It is organized in three parts: the first discusses statistical characteristics of pantograph-catenary data, such as stationarity, periodicity, correlation, high-order statistical properties and wave characteristics of contact lines, which are the basis of pantograph-catenary relationship analysis. The second part includes geometry parameter detection and support-system fault detection in catenary, as well as slide-fault detection in pantographs, and presents some new detection algorithms and plans. The final part addresses catenary estimation, including detection of contact-line wire irregularities and estimation of catenary based on spectrum, and presents detection methods for contact-line irregularity and modern spectrum estimation tools for catenary.

This book discusses the models and tools available for solving configuration problems, emphasizes the value of model integration to obtain comprehensive and robust configuration decisions, proposes solutions for supply chain configuration in the presence of stochastic and dynamic factors, and illustrates application of the techniques discussed in applied studies. It is divided into four parts, which are devoted to defining the supply chain configuration problem and identifying key issues, describing solutions to various problems identified, proposing technologies for enabling supply chain confirmations, and discussing applied supply chain configuration problems.Its distinguishing features are: an explicit focus on the configuration problem an in-depth coverage of configuration models an emphasis on model integration and application of information modeling techniques in decision-making New to this edition is Part II: Technologies, which introduces readers to various technologies being utilized for supply chain configuration and contains two new chapters. The volume also has an added emphasis on the most recent theoretical developments and empirical findings in the area of supply chain management and related topics. This book is appropriate for professional and technical readers, including research directors, research associates, and institutions involved in both the design and implementation of logistics systems in manufacturing and service-related products. An equally appropriate audience is the academic reader, including professors, research associates, and students in industrial, manufacturing, mechanical, and automotive engineering departments, as well as engineering management, management sciences, and production and operations management.

The development of computer software for nonlinear control systems has provided many benefits for teaching, research, and the development of control systems design. MATLAB is considered the dominant software platforms for linear and nonlinear control systems analysis. This book provides an easy way to learn nonlinear control systems such as feedback linearization technique and Sliding mode control (Structure variable control) which are one of the most used techniques in nonlinear control dynamical systems; therefore teachers-students and researchers are all in need to handle such techniques; and since they are too difficult for them to handle such nonlinear controllers especially for a more complicated systems such as induction motor, satellite, and vehicles dynamical models. Thus, this document it is an excellent resource for learning the principle of feedback linearization and sliding mode techniques in an easy and simple way: Provides a briefs description of the feedback linearization and sliding mode control strategies Includes a simple method on how to determine the right and appropriate controller (P-PI-PID) for feedback linearization control strategy. A Symbolic MATLAB Based function for finding the feedback linearization and sliding mode controllers are developed and tested using several examples. A simple method for finding the approximate sliding mode controller parameters is introduced Where the program used to construct the nonlinear controller uses symbolic computations; such that the user should provide the program with the necessary functions f(x), g(x) and h(x) using the symbolic library.

Power systems are increasingly collecting large amounts of data due to the expansion of the Internet of Things into power grids. In a smart grids scenario, a huge number of intelligent devices will be connected with almost no human intervention characterizing a machine-to-machine scenario, which is one of the pillars of the Internet of Things. The book characterizes and evaluates how the emerging growth of data in communications networks applied to smart grids will impact the grid efficiency and reliability. Additionally, this book discusses the various security concerns that become manifest with Big Data and expanded communications in power grids. Provide a general description and definition of big data, which has been gaining significant attention in the research community. Introduces a comprehensive overview of big data optimization methods in power system. Reviews the communication devices used in critical infrastructure, especially power systems; security methods available to vet the identity of devices; and general security threats in CI networks. Presents applications in power systems, such as power flow and protection. Reviews electricity theft concerns and the wide variety of data-driven techniques and applications developed for electricity theft detection.