Xin Xu – författare

Bringing together cutting-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, the Handbook expertly outlines key domains including the public value, policy and governance of research, knowledge dynamics, and research cultures and careers. Engaging with diverse philosophical, theoretical and methodological approaches, it examines global dynamics in research and explores equality, diversity and inclusion across sectors, career stages and geographical regions. Taking on board multi-layered perspectives from beyond traditional and exclusionary epistemic boundaries, the Handbook offers unique insight into this broad landscape of knowledge.

The Handbook of Meta-Research will appeal to researchers and students in a broad range of fields from the social sciences, arts and humanities and STEM who are concerned with the environments, institutions, policies, practices and evaluations that impact their work, and will be a useful starting point for researchers wanting to initiate meta-research studies to examine their own environments, actions and behaviours. Regulators, users and beneficiaries of research will similarly benefit from this authoritative reference work.

A New-Generation Density Functional: Towards Chemical Accuracy for Chemistry of Main Group Elements covers the most recent progress in the development of a new generation of density functional theory (DFT) for accurate descriptions of thermochemistry, thermochemical kinetics, and nonbonded interactions of main group molecules. In this book, the authors present the doubly hybrid density functionals (DHDFs), which dramatically improve the accuracy for predictions of critical properties by including the role of the virtual (unoccupied) orbitals. The authors not only discuss the theoretical bases of three classes of DHDFs but also demonstrate their performance using some well-established benchmarking data sets.

In this book, improvements in the heat resistance of silicon nitride (Si3N4) ceramics using grain boundary control and in plasticity at high temperatures using grain size control in order to reduce the cost of shaping Si3N4 are described.

The heat resistance of Si3N4 is improved by mixing a slight amount of sintering additive as an impurity into the original material powder. The author presents his findings on the high heat resistance of Si3N4.

The author also develops a new fabrication method for Si3N4 nano-ceramics that produces high plastic formability. The method developed offers two improved points in grinding and sintering processes. The author found that the plastic formability of Si3N4 nanoceramics is dependent on load stress; the results of his research are detailed in this book.