This book provides an excellent review and analysis of the latest information on rechargeable Li-S battery research. With a clear and concise writing style and in-depth technical material, this book will appeal to undergraduates and graduates, researchers, chemists, material scientists, and physicists working in the field of energy storage, especially those with an interest in Li-S battery technology. IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine shows lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries give us an alternative to the more prevalent lithium-ion (Li-ion) versions and are known for their observed high-energy densities. Systems using Li-S batteries are in the early stages of development, and commercialization however could potentially provide higher, safer levels of energy at significantly lower cost. In this book, the history, scientific background, challenges, and future perspectives of the lithium-sulfur system are presented by experts in the field. Focus is on past and recent advances of each cell compartment responsible for the performance of the Li-S battery and includes analysis of characterization tools, new designs, and computational modeling. As a comprehensive review of the current state of play, it is ideal for undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, physicists, chemists, and materials scientists interested in energy storage, material science, and electrochemistry.

​This book accommodates the existing correlations, data, and methods for thermodynamic and thermophysical properties of saline water, including multiple components at a wide range of salinity (reaching around 200 g/kg), temperature, and pressure. The correlations of each property are plotted against existing experimental data to judge the comparative accuracy of each within a given specific range of salinity, temperature, and pressure. An assessment to recommend some correlations is also conducted. New correlations for some properties are also proposed. This book helps to provide the saline water properties as needed for engineers, designers, and research for different areas, including desalination and water treatment. All the analytical analysis, thermodynamic analysis, and design models of the desalination technologies depend on saline water properties. As scientists and researchers working on different desalination technologies, the authors found it difficult to find all saline water properties in one source, including multicomponent and binary salty solutions, under different conditions (salinity, temperature, and pressure). Therefore, the authors introduce this book to fill the gap in the open literature. This book compiles the thermodynamic and thermophysical properties of saline water, involving thermodynamic approaches, multicomponent models, and simple correlations and data, comparison between the correlations of properties in figures, recommendation of the most accurate correlations and methods, and the used codes to estimate these correlations and methods. It is expected that this book to be a principal source for all interests in desalination and water treatment subjects.

This book provides a concise treatise on the use of surfactants in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), including information on key types of surfactants and their respective applications in the wider petroleum industry. The authors discuss carbon dioxide EOR, alkaline-surfactant-polymer flooding strategies, and the use of surfactants as a means of reducing interfacial tension, while also paying special attention to the challenges involved in using surfactants for enhanced oil recovery, such as the difficult issue of surfactant adsorption on reservoir rock. All chapters highlight and are based on the authors' own laboratory-scale case studies. Given its content, the book offers a valuable asset for graduate students of petroleum and chemical engineering, as well as researchers in the field of chemical enhanced oil recovery. It will also be of interest to professionals involved in enhanced industrial oil recovery.

Agriculture is considered as a backbone of developing nations as it caters the needs of the people, directly or indirectly. The global agriculture currently faces enormous challenges like land degradation and reduced soil fertility, shrinking of land, low production yield, water accessibility and a dearth of labor due to evacuation of individuals from farming. Besides, the global population increases at an exponential rate and it is predicted that the global population will be 9 billion by 2050 that in turn leads to food crisis in near future. Although, green revolution revolutionizes the agriculture sector by enhancing the yield but it was not considered as a sustainable approach. Exorbitant use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to boost the crop yield is definitely not a convenient approach for agriculture sustainability in the light of the fact that these chemical fertilizers are considered as double-edged sword, which on one hand enhance the crop yield but at the same time possess deleterious effect on the soil microflora and thus declines its fertility. Besides, it cause irreversible damage to the soil texture and disrupts the equilibrium in the food chain across ecosystem, which might in turn lead to genetic mutations in future generations of consumers. Thus, the increased dependence on fabricated agricultural additives during and post green revolution has generated serious issues pertaining to sustainability, environmental impact and health hazards. Therefore, nano-biotechnology has emerged as a promising tool to tackle the above problems especially in the agriculture sector. Nano-agribusiness is an emerged field to enhance crop yield, rejuvenate soil health, provide precision farming and stimulate plant growth. Nano-biotechnology is an essential tool in modern agriculture and is considered as a primary economic driver in near future. It is evaluated that joining of cutting edge nanotechnology in agribusiness would push the worldwide monetary development to approximately US$ 3.4 trillion by 2020 which clearly indicates that how agri-nanobiotechnology plays a pivotal role in the agricultural sector, without any negative impact on the environment and other regulatory issues of biosafety. Agri-nanobiotechnology is an innovative green technology, which provides the solution to global food security, sustainability and climate change. The current book is presenting the role of nano-biotechnology in modern agriculture and how it plays a pivotal role to boost the agri-business.

Food biopolymers: Structural, functional and nutraceutical properties provides valuable coverage of all major food biopolymers from plant, animal and marine sources. The text focuses on the structural characteristics of biopolymers including starch, non-starch polysaccharides, proteins and fats. A full section is dedicated to the nutraceutical potential and applications of these polymers. Further sections provide comprehensive overviews of the development of functional food products and important data on biopolymer behavior and nutraceutical potential during processing. Researchers hoping to gain a basic understanding of the techno-functional, nutraceutical potential and applications of food biopolymers will find a singular source with this text. The first section of this work focuses on the the structure, functions, bioactivity and applications of starches. The next chapters cover non-starch polysaccharides. Further sections are dedicated to proteins, lipids and oils. A detailed overview is provided for each, followed by application procedures, specifics on individual types, proteins and enzymes, and nutraceutical properties. This work can be used as a singular source for all relevant information on food biopolymers and their structural and functional properties, including their potential to increase food quality, improve shelf life, and reduce pollution and waste in the food industry.

This book focuses on data and how modern business firms use social data, specifically Online Social Networks (OSNs) incorporated as part of the infrastructure for a number of emerging applications such as personalized recommendation systems, opinion analysis, expertise retrieval, and computational advertising. This book identifies how in such applications, social data offers a plethora of benefits to enhance the decision making process. This book highlights that business intelligence applications are more focused on structured data; however, in order to understand and analyse the social big data, there is a need to aggregate data from various sources and to present it in a plausible format. Big Social Data (BSD) exhibit all the typical properties of big data: wide physical distribution, diversity of formats, non-standard data models, independently-managed and heterogeneous semantics but even further valuable with marketing opportunities. The book provides a review of the current state-of-the-art approaches for big social data analytics as well as to present dissimilar methods to infer value from social data. The book further examines several areas of research that benefits from the propagation of the social data. In particular, the book presents various technical approaches that produce data analytics capable of handling big data features and effective in filtering out unsolicited data and inferring a value. These approaches comprise advanced technical solutions able to capture huge amounts of generated data, scrutinise the collected data to eliminate unwanted data, measure the quality of the inferred data, and transform the amended data for further data analysis. Furthermore, the book presents solutions to derive knowledge and sentiments from BSD and to provide social data classification and prediction. The approaches in this book also incorporate several technologies such as semantic discovery, sentiment analysis, affective computing and machine learning. This book has additional special feature enriched with numerous illustrations such as tables, graphs and charts incorporating advanced visualisation tools in accessible an attractive display.

This book demonstrates the basic and fundamental aspects of nanotechnology and potential application as a photocatalysis in multiple application especially in environment and energy harvesting. This book also contains methods of preparation and characterization of unique nanostructured photocatalysts, and details about their catalytic action. The book consists of seven chapters, including the principles and fundamentals of heterogeneous photocatalysis; the mechanisms and dynamics of surface photocatalysis; research on pure and composites based materials with unique nanostructures; the latest developments and advances in exploiting photocatalyst alternatives to WO3; and photocatalytic materials for applications other than the traditional degradation of pollutants, such as carbon dioxide reduction, water oxidation, a complete spectrum of selective organic transformations and water splitting by photocatalytic reduction. This book will appeal to a wide readership of the academic and industrial researchers and it can also be used in the classroom for undergraduate and graduate students focusing on heterogeneous photocatalysis, sustainable chemistry, energy conversion and storage, nanotechnology, chemical engineering, environmental protection, optoelectronics, sensors, and surface and interface science.

This book presents the basic and fundamental aspects of nanomaterials, its types, and classifications with respect to different factors. It contains methods of preparation and characterization of unique nanostructured materials. Consisting of six chapters, this book appeals to a wide readership from academia and industry professionals and is also useful to undergraduate and graduate students focusing on nanotechnology and nanomaterials, sustainable chemistry, energy conversion and storage, environmental protection, opto-electronics, sensors, and surface and interface science. It also appeals to readers who wish to know about the design of new types of materials with controlled nanostructures.

Treatment of Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia: Modern Techniques is an up-to-date review of modern techniques used to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia. It provides a comprehensive review of both office and operating room based techniques. Both electrosurgical and laser based techniques are covered. These include high powered 532 nm laser photoselective laser vaporization of the prostate (PVP), holmium laser enucleation/ablation of the prostate (HoLEP/HoLAP), and Bipolar Electrovaporization of the Prostate (Bipolar EVP/Bipolar TURP). In addition, a comprehensive review of office based techniques and future therapies currently being developed is presented. Each of these techniques are presented in a balanced fashion with a focus on modern literature. Treatment of Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia: Modern Techniques will be of great value to Urologists, Urology Residents, Iternists, and Family Practitioners.

In a distilled and pedagogical fashion, the contributions to this volume of the famous summer school in Les Houches cover the recent developments in supersymmetric string theory, the gauge theory/string theory correspondence and string duality. Further chapters deal with quantum gravity and D-brane geometry. Black hole mechanics and cosmology are treated too, as well as the AdS-CFT correspondence. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments in string/M-theory and quantum gravity. It addresses graduate students in physics and astrophysics.