Mechanical Alloying is intended as an introduction to the mechanical alloying technique used in developing different materials systems. It is useful not only to undergraduate and post-graduate students, but also to scientists and engineers who wish to gain some understanding of the process. Mechanical Alloying begins with a brief introduction providing a historical background to the development of the mechanical alloying process. Currently there are several different types of ball mills available, some of them specially designed for the mechanical alloying process. Since the resultant materials are milling-intensity and milling-temperature dependent, ball mills should be carefully selected in order to obtain the desired materials and structures. This is discussed in Chapter 2. The actual mechanical alloying process is considered in Chapter 3. As it is essential to understand the use of processing control agents, the physical properties of some commonly used agents are listed. Chapter 4 deals with the formation of new materials and presents the mechanical alloying of Al, Ti and Mg alloys and their intermetallics. The formation of composite materials using this technique is also discussed in detail. Several examples of the mechanical alloying of amorphous materials, an important group of engineering materials where mechanical alloying is commonly employed, are given. Chapter 5 looks at the characterization of the alloyed powders. Details of the use of X-ray diffraction to identify crystalline size, the use of thermal analysis and measurement of particle size are provided. Densification methods are discussed in Chapter 6 while mechanisms of strengthening the composite materials bymechanical alloying are considered in Chapter 7. To understand the mechanisms of the alloying technique so that better control of the process can be exercised, the effects of temperature, activation energy, and grain size on diffusion during the alloying process are examined in Chapter 8. The last chapter of the book, Chapter 9, deals with the dynamics and modeling of the alloying process together with some experimental outputs.

This book features invited contributions based on the presentations at the First World Interpreter and Translator Training Association (WITTA) Congress, held in Guangzhou, China, in November 2016. Covering a wide range of topics in translation education, it includes papers on the latest developments in the field, theoretical discussions, and the practical implementation of translation courses and programs. Given its scope, the book appeals to translation scholars and practitioners, education policymakers, and language and education service providers.

Fractal analysis has rapidly become an important field in materials science and engineering with broad applications to theoretical analysis and quantitative description of microstructures of materials. Fractal methods have thus far shown great potential in engineering applications in quantitative microscopic analysis of materials using commercial microscopes.
This book attempts to introduce the fundamentals and the basis methods of fractal description of microstructures in combination with digital imaging and computer technologies. Basic concepts are given in the form of mathematical expressions. Detailed algorithms in practical applications are also provided. Fractal measurement, error analysis and fractal description of cluster growth, thin films and surfaces are emphasized in this book.
Image-Based Fractal Description of Microstructures provides a comprehensive approach to materials characterization by fractal from theory to application.

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers.

The term rapid prototyping (RP) refers to a generic group of emerging technologies that enable very quick fabrication of engineering components primarily targeted for prototyping applications. With RP, very complex three dimensional parts or prototypes can be fabricated without the need of costly tooling and machining. This inevitably leads to much shorter design cycle time and lower cost of building a prototype. Its manifold benefits include significant productivity gains, cost saving, and shortened development time to introduce concept models. As such, RP technologies have attracted tremendous R&D interests from both academia and industry in the past decade. Many different processes and materials have been commercialized and used in industry primarily for the fabrication of physical prototypes. More recent interests in RP technologies are towards functional applications of the fabricated parts, such as in rapid tooling applications and replacements of damaged components. Many processes and materials have been commercialized but are yet to be able to fulfill the aforementioned functional requirements because of limited mechanical strengths of the fabricated parts."

This book proposes a bank risk aggregation framework based on financial statements. Specifically, bank risk aggregation is of great importance to maintain stable operation of banking industry and prevent financial crisis. A major obstacle to bank risk management is the problem of data shortage, which makes many quantitative risk aggregation approaches typically fail. Recently, to overcome the problem of inaccurate total risk results caused by the shortage of risk data, some researchers have proposed a series of financial statements-based bank risk aggregation approaches. However, the existing studies have drawbacks of low frequency and time lag of financial statements data and usually ignore off-balance sheet business risk in bank risk aggregation. Thus, by reviewing the research progress in bank risk aggregation based on financial statements and improving the drawbacks of existing methods, this book proposes a bank risk aggregation framework based on financial statements. It makes full use of information recorded in financial statements, including income statement, on- and off-balance sheet assets, and textual risk disclosures, which solves the problem of data shortage in bank risk aggregation to some extent and improves the reliability and rationality of bank risk aggregation results. This book not only improves the theoretical studies of bank risk aggregation, but also provides an important support for the capital allocation of the banking industry in practice. Thus, this book has theoretical and practical importance for bank managers and researchers of bank risk management.

This volume is a collection of papers from experts and scholars presented at the 2015 International Conference on Manufacturing Engineering and Intelligent Materials (ICMEIM 2015), Guangzhou, January 30-31, 2015. It serves to discuss and share the latest new research results and developments on the topics manufacturing system and control engineering, materials engineering and other relativant subjects. It will also strengthen the exchange and cooperation in the field of Manufacturing Engineering and Intelligent Materials.

This book combines the proceedings of Mechanical Behavior of Nanomaterials - Experiments and Modeling, and Plasticity in Confined Volumes - Modeling and Experiments. These two symposia brought together researchers to exchange ideas about the mechanical behavior of materials where size, be it microstructural or geometric, plays an important role. Firstly it focuses on understanding the mechanical behavior of nanostructured materials, such as nanoscale thin films, nanowires, nanotubes, and nanoparticles, as well as nanoporous, nanograined and nanotwinned materials. Such materials with submicron length scales are important building blocks for next-generation functional devices and materials systems. The second focus is on understanding how micron and submicron external and internal microstructural-length scales play a defining role in the strength and ductility of a material. Modern simulation methods have revealed a diverse range of atomic and mesoscale processes that can contribute to the emergent plasticity of such complex materials. Topics include: nanostructured materials; polymers and composites; simulations and modeling and microcompression and nanoindentation.

This volume is a collection of papers from experts and scholars presented at the 2015 International Conference on Manufacturing Engineering and Intelligent Materials (ICMEIM 2015), Guangzhou, January 30-31, 2015. It serves to discuss and share the latest new research results and developments on the topics manufacturing system and control engineering, materials engineering and other relativant subjects. It will also strengthen the exchange and cooperation in the field of Manufacturing Engineering and Intelligent Materials.

This book provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the principal machine learning methods, covering both supervised and unsupervised learning methods. It discusses essential methods of classification and regression in supervised learning, such as decision trees, perceptrons, support vector machines, maximum entropy models, logistic regression models and multiclass classification, as well as methods applied in supervised learning, like the hidden Markov model and conditional random fields. In the context of unsupervised learning, it examines clustering and other problems as well as methods such as singular value decomposition, principal component analysis and latent semantic analysis. As a fundamental book on machine learning, it addresses the needs of researchers and students who apply machine learning as an important tool in their research, especially those in fields such as information retrieval, natural language processing and text data mining. In order to understand the concepts and methods discussed, readers are expected to have an elementary knowledge of advanced mathematics, linear algebra and probability statistics. The detailed explanations of basic principles, underlying concepts and algorithms enable readers to grasp basic techniques, while the rigorous mathematical derivations and specific examples included offer valuable insights into machine learning.