Aerospace vehicles are by their very nature a crucial environment for safety-critical systems. By virtue of an effective safety control system, the aerospace vehicle can maintain high performance despite the risk of component malfunction and multiple disturbances, thereby enhancing aircraft safety and the probability of success for a mission. Autonomous Safety Control of Flight Vehicles presents a systematic methodology for improving the safety of aerospace vehicles in the face of the following occurrences: a loss of control effectiveness of actuators and control surface impairments; the disturbance of observer-based control against multiple disturbances; actuator faults and model uncertainties in hypersonic gliding vehicles; and faults arising from actuator faults and sensor faults. Several fundamental issues related to safety are explicitly analyzed according to aerospace engineering system characteristics; while focusing on these safety issues, the safety control design problems of aircraft are studied and elaborated on in detail using systematic design methods. The research results illustrate the superiority of the safety control approaches put forward. The expected reader group for this book includes undergraduate and graduate students but also industry practitioners and researchers. About the Authors: Xiang Yu is a Professor with the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. His research interests include safety control of aerospace engineering systems, guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned aerial vehicles. Lei Guo, appointed as "Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professor", is a Professor with the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. His research interests include anti-disturbance control and filtering, stochastic control, and fault detection with their applications to aerospace systems. Youmin Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His research interests include fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control, and cooperative guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) of unmanned aerial/space/ground/surface vehicles. Jin Jiang is a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. His research interests include fault-tolerant control of safety-critical systems, advanced control of power plants containing non-traditional energy resources, and instrumentation and control for nuclear power plants.

This volume examines the sustainability of higher education massification throughout the Asia Pacific region. The massification of higher education has swept across the region over the past three decades in complex and astounding ways in some cases. The book inquires after the many faces that higher education massification is taking in varied country settings and seeks to identify the more important implications that follow. It discusses massification and its sustainability within the region's complex contexts and addresses the issues of implications, challenges, and limitations. Paying particular attention to implications on resources, employment and social mobility, institutional identity, programs, funding and teacher education, the book explores the capacity of countries to stay on the course they have chosen and the implications this may have for the continued identification of resources to do so, the choice to focus more particularly and importantly on the considerable range of innovations and variations and the ability to recognize and develop them in meaningful ways.

This volume examines the sustainability of higher education massification throughout the Asia Pacific region. The massification of higher education has swept across the region over the past three decades in complex and astounding ways in some cases. The book inquires after the many faces that higher education massification is taking in varied country settings and seeks to identify the more important implications that follow. It discusses massification and its sustainability within the region's complex contexts and addresses the issues of implications, challenges, and limitations. Paying particular attention to implications on resources, employment and social mobility, institutional identity, programs, funding and teacher education, the book explores the capacity of countries to stay on the course they have chosen and the implications this may have for the continued identification of resources to do so, the choice to focus more particularly and importantly on the considerable range of innovations and variations and the ability to recognize and develop them in meaningful ways.

Aerospace vehicles are by their very nature a crucial environment for safety-critical systems. By virtue of an effective safety control system, the aerospace vehicle can maintain high performance despite the risk of component malfunction and multiple disturbances, thereby enhancing aircraft safety and the probability of success for a mission. Autonomous Safety Control of Flight Vehicles presents a systematic methodology for improving the safety of aerospace vehicles in the face of the following occurrences: a loss of control effectiveness of actuators and control surface impairments; the disturbance of observer-based control against multiple disturbances; actuator faults and model uncertainties in hypersonic gliding vehicles; and faults arising from actuator faults and sensor faults. Several fundamental issues related to safety are explicitly analyzed according to aerospace engineering system characteristics; while focusing on these safety issues, the safety control design problems of aircraft are studied and elaborated on in detail using systematic design methods. The research results illustrate the superiority of the safety control approaches put forward. The expected reader group for this book includes undergraduate and graduate students but also industry practitioners and researchers. About the Authors: Xiang Yu is a Professor with the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. His research interests include safety control of aerospace engineering systems, guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned aerial vehicles. Lei Guo, appointed as "Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professor", is a Professor with the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. His research interests include anti-disturbance control and filtering, stochastic control, and fault detection with their applications to aerospace systems. Youmin Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His research interests include fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control, and cooperative guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) of unmanned aerial/space/ground/surface vehicles. Jin Jiang is a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. His research interests include fault-tolerant control of safety-critical systems, advanced control of power plants containing non-traditional energy resources, and instrumentation and control for nuclear power plants.

Modern technological systems rely on sophisticated control functions to meet increased performance requirements. For such systems, Fault Tolerant Control Systems (FTCS) need to be developed. Active FTCS are dependent on a Fault Detection and Identification (FDI) process to monitor system performance and to detect and isolate faults in the systems. The main objective of this book is to study and to validate some important issues in real-time Active FTCS by means of theoretical analysis and simulation. Several models are presented to achieve this objective, taking into consideration practical aspects of the system to be controlled, performance deterioration in FDI algorithms, and limitations in reconfigurable control laws.

In many fields such as telecommunications, multimedia, medical technology, radar and sonar, man-machine communications, we utilize advanced signal processing techniques to extrapolate underlying information on specific problems for the purpose of decision making. Traditional signal processing approaches assume the stationarity of signals, which in practice is not often satisfied. Hence, time or frequency descriptions alone are insufficient to provide comprehensive information about such signals. On the contrary, time-frequency analysis is more suitable for non-stationary signals. Therefore, this book provides a status report of feature-based signal processing in the time-frequency domain through an overview of recent contributions. The feature considered here is energy concentration. The material covered in this book should help shed some light on this exciting topic, and should be especially useful to professionals in many fields dealing with the analysis of non-stationary signals.

Understand the impact of fatigue on high strength steel joints with this comprehensive overview High strength steels are highly sought after for industrial and engineering applications ranging from armored vehicles to welded engineering components built to withstand considerable stress. The mechanical properties of welded joints made from high strength steel are integrally linked to the specific welding process, which can have an enormous impact on fatigue performance. Welded High Strength Steel Structures: Welding Effects and Fatigue Performance provides a comprehensive analysis of high strength steel joints and the ramifications of the welding process. It guides readers through the process of performing thermal analysis of high strength steel structures and evaluate fatigue performance in the face of residual stress. The result is a volume with innumerable use cases in engineering and manufacture. Welded High Strength Steel Structures readers will also find: An author with decades of experience in research and engineering Numerous studies of various classes of high strength steel joints Studies on tubular structures for welding residual stress Welded High Strength Steel Structures is a must-own for welding specialists, materials scientists, mechanical engineers, and researchers or industry professionals in related fields.

This ground-breaking volume documents women's influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male form into an all-female one, with women cross-dressing as male characters for a largely female audience. Yue opera originated in the Zhejiang countryside as a form of story-singing, which rural immigrants brought with them to the metropolis of Shanghai. There, in the 1930s, its content and style transformed from rural to urban, and its cast changed gender. By evolving in response to sociopolitical and commercial conditions and actress-initiated reforms, Yue opera emerged as Shanghai's most popular opera from the 1930s through the 1980s and illustrates the historical rise of women in Chinese public culture. Jiang examines the origins of the genre in the context of the local operas that preceded it and situates its development amid the political, cultural, and social movements that swept both Shanghai and China in the twentieth century. She details the contributions of opera stars and related professionals and examines the relationships among actresses, patrons, and fans. As Yue opera actresses initiated reforms to purge their theater of bawdy eroticism in favor of the modern love drama, they elevated their social image, captured the public imagination, and sought independence from the patriarchal opera system by establishing their own companies. Throughout the story of Yue opera, Jiang looks at Chinese women's struggle to control their lives, careers, and public images and to claim ownership of their history and artistic representations.