This work will educate chip and system designers on a method for accurately predicting circuit and system reliability in order to estimate failures that will occur in the field as a function of operating conditions at the chip level. This book will combine the knowledge taught in many reliability publications and illustrate how to use the knowledge presented by the semiconductor manufacturing companies in combination with the HTOL end-of-life testing that is currently performed by the chip...

Solar Energy Forecasting and Resource Assessment is a vital text for solar energy professionals, addressing a critical gap in the core literature of the field. As major barriers to solar energy implementation, such as materials cost and low conversion efficiency, continue to fall, issues of intermittency and reliability have come to the fore. Scrutiny from solar project developers and their financiers on the accuracy of long-term resource projections and grid operators' concerns about vari...

A large international conference on Advances in Machine Learning and Data Analysis was held in UC Berkeley, California, USA, October 22-24, 2008, under the auspices of the World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science (WCECS 2008). This volume contains sixteen revised and extended research articles written by prominent researchers participating in the conference. Topics covered include Expert system, Intelligent decision making, Knowledge-based systems, Knowledge extraction, Data anal...

A Detailed Guide to the New Generation of Smart Process PlantsMaximize plant profitability by minimizing operating costs. Smart Process Plants addresses measurements and the data they generate, error-free process variable estimation, control, fault detection, instrumentation upgrade, and maintenance optimization, and then connects these activities to plant economics. Methods for calculating the value of the information produced are included. The book discu...

The development of oil and gas fields offshore requires specialized pipeline equipment. The structures must be strong enough to with stand the harshest environments, and ensure that production is not interrupted and remains economically feasible. However, recent events in the Gulf of Mexico have placed a new importance on maintenance and reliability. A new section; Condition Based Maintenance (CBM), introduces the subject of maintenance, written by Tian Ran Lin, Queensland University of Te...

Hydroelectric power stations are a major source of electricity around the world; understanding their dynamics is crucial to achieving good performance. The electrical power generated is normally controlled by individual feedback loops on each unit. The reference input to the power loop is the grid frequency deviation from its set point, thus structuring an external frequency control loop. The book discusses practical and well-documented cases of modelling and controlling hydropower station...

All engineers could bene?t from at least one course in reliability physics and engineering. It is very likely that, starting with your very ?rst engineering po- tion, you will be asked — how long is your newly developed device expected to last? This text was designed to help you to answer this fundamentally important question. All materials and devices are expected to degrade with time, so it is very natural to ask — how long will the product last? The evidence for material/device degradat...

This engineering textbook is designed to introduce advanced control systems for vehicles, including advanced automotive concepts and the next generation of vehicles for ITS. For each automotive control problem considered, the authors emphasise the physics and underlying principles behind the control system concept and design. This is an exciting and rapidly developing field for which many articles and reports exist but no modern unifying text. An extensive list of references is provided at...

Most chemists, whether they are biochemists, organic, analytical, pharmaceutical or clinical chemists and many pharmacists and biologists need to perform chemical analysis. Consequently, they are not only confronted with carrying out the actual analysis, but also with problems such as method selection, experimental design, optimization, calibration, data acquisition and handling, and statistics in order to obtain maximum relevant chemical information. In other words: they are confronted wi...

This book presents methodologies suitable for the optimal design of control and diagnosis strategies for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) systems. One key feature of the methodologies presented is the use of modeling tools with an ideal balance between accuracy and computational burden. Particular emphasis is given to the useful combination of models within a hierarchical framework to reduce the experimental efforts required for characterization and testing. Such tools are proven to be highly ...

The use of composites is growing in structural applications in many industries including aerospace, marine, wind turbine and civil engineering. There are uncertainties about the long term performance of these composites and how they will perform under cyclic fatigue loading. Fatigue life prediction of composites and composite structures provides a comprehensive review of fatigue damage and fatigue life prediction methodologies for composites and how they can be used in practice.After an in...

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...