Magnetism encompasses a wide range of systems and physical phenomena, and its study has posed and exposed both important fundamental problems and many practical applications.
Recently, several entirely new phenomena have thus been discovered, generated through cooperative behaviour which could not have been predicted from a knowledge of one-spin' states. At the same time, advances in sample preparation, experimental technique, apparatus and radiation sources, have led to increasing precision in the investigation and exposure of greater subtleties in magnetic thin films, multilayers and...

More than ten million poison gas' shells, mortar bombs, etc., lie hidden in Europe, many of them relics from World War I. Some were fired and failed to detonate, others were abandoned in old ammunition dumps. Most retain their load of chemical warfare (CW) agents. They are turned up daily in the course of farming and construction. Many European nations have permanent departments concerned with their collection and destruction.
Old munitions, when discovered, are usually heavily corroded and difficult to identify. Is it a CW munition? Or an explosive? If CW, what agent does it contain?...

Environmental Contamination and Remediation Practices at Former and Present Military Bases outlines the different strategies that are useful in the investigation and subsequent remediation of military bases, Particular attention is paid to the pollution of groundwater. The book contains an excellent review of useful remediation techniques and several examples of their application to polluted military bases. Several mathematical models are demonstrated, showing their predictive value for real examples.
A detailed list is given of chemical pollutants that can be found on...

The development, production, stockpiling and use in war of biological and toxin weapons are prohibited by international law. Although not explicitly stated, the two treaties outlawing such activities, the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972, prohibit the continuation of activities previously performed in Biological and Toxin Weapons facilities not justified for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes. Because conversion and other means of cessation of former BTW facilities are not explicitly addressed in the treaties mentioned above the...

During 27-31 July 1997, thirty-seven researchers in acoustics, aeronautics, elastodynamics, electromagnetics, hydrodynamics and mathematics participated in a Symposium on Computa- tional Methods for Unbounded Domains. The symposium was sponsored by the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and was held at the University of Colorado in the United States of America. The symposium was opened by Dr. Richard Byyny, Chancellor of the University's Boulder Campus, who concluded his remarks by reading a letter from Professor Bruno A. Boley, JUT AM Representative on the Scientific...

A comprehensive assessment of the methodologies of thermodynamic optimization, exergy analysis and thermoeconomics, and their application to the design of efficient and environmentally sound energy systems. The chapters are organized in a sequence that begins with pure thermodynamics and progresses towards the blending of thermodynamics with other disciplines, such as heat transfer and cost accounting. Three methods of analysis stand out: entropy generation minimization, exergy (or availability) analysis, and thermoeconomics.
The book reviews current directions in a field that is both...

System-Level Synthesis deals with the concurrent design of electronic applications, including both hardware and software. The issue has become the bottleneck in the design of electronic systems, including both hardware and software, in several major industrial fields, including telecommunications, automotive and aerospace engineering. The major difficulty with the subject is that it demands contributions from several research fields, including system specification, system architecture, hardware design, and software design. Most existing book cover well only a few aspects of...

The Origin of Stars and Planetary Systems is a collection of tutorial reviews that critically and systematically discuss the current state of our knowledge of star formation and early stellar evolution, from the genesis of giant molecular clouds to the birth of young stars and their surrounding planetary systems.
The chapters are written at the graduate student level by a group of twenty internationally distinguished scientists. The emphasis is on fundamentals rather than recent research results. The book thus provides a rigorous treatment of the basic empirical and theoretical...

Computer simulations provide an essential set of tools for understanding the macroscopic properties of liquid crystals and of their phase transitions in terms of molecular models. While simulations of liquid crystals are based on the same general Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics techniques as are used for other fluids, they present a number of specific problems and peculiarities connected to the intrinsic properties of these mesophases.
The field of computer simulations of anisotropic fluids is interdisciplinary and is evolving very rapidly. The present volume covers a variety of...

Electrical drives lie at the heart of most industrial processes and make a major contribution to the comfort and high quality products we all take for granted. They provide the controller power needed at all levels, from megawatts in cement production to milliwatts in wrist watches. Other examples are legion, from the domestic kitchen to public utilities. The modern electrical drive is a complex item, comprising a controller, a static converter and an electrical motor. Some can be programmed by the user. Some can communicate with other drives. Semiconductor switches have improved, intelligent...