Thermal Science and Energy Engineering Collection – serie

Most energy systems are suboptimized. Businesses and consumers are so focused on initial costs that they underestimate the effect of operating the energy system over its life. This suboptimization creates a fantastic opportunity to not only make a wise decision financially but also reduce the environmental impact of energy systems. There are three simple tools, known to all mechanical engineers, that when added to traditional thermodynamics, enable an engineer to find the true optimum of an energy system. In this concise book, you will be equipped with these tools and will understand how they are applied to cooling systems. The target audiences for this book are mechanical engineering students in their first semester of thermodynamics through engineers with 20+ years of experience in the design of cooling systems. First semester thermodynamic students will benefit the most from Appendixes A and C in Chapter 1. The rest of Chapter 1 is written at a level where any undergraduate mechanical engineering student who is taking heat transfer will be able to quickly assimilate the knowledge. This book also has the depth to handle the latent load, which will provide the practicing engineer with the tools necessary to handle the complexity of real cooling systems.

In this book, an almost new approach to modern thermodynamics has been applied. One or more useful qualitative discussion statements have been extracted from each equation. These and other important statements were numbered and their titles were situated in an index titled ""Hilal and Others' statements, definitions and rules."" This ensures very quick obtaining of the required statements, rules, definitions, equations, and their theoretical base that will ease readers qualitative discussions and calculations.

Essays in Energy is a collection of a number of essays by the same number of engineers. They show a variety of viewpoints and diversity. This collection is meant to incite and excite conversation among engineers, scientists, and society at large. It would serve as a catalyst for a three-credit course as an introductory engineering subject to non-engineering university students. As university education develops to better prepare future leaders to appreciate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, engineering courses for non-engineering majors are essential and so is the requirement of worthy textbooks. This monograph intends to be one of the useful tools available. The wide range of topics includes nuclear power, small hydroelectric plants, wind turbines, and organic photovoltaics. Nanotechnology, natural gas, and deep sea oil drilling are presented as well.

Fuel cell technology has attracted great interest in recent decades. However, progress in lignocellulosic biomass-energized fuel cells has been slow. This is because that lignocellulosic biomass generally cannot be directly used for electricity generation in a fuel cell with high efficiency. As a renewable resource is available in large quantities in many regions of the world, lignocellulosic biomass can be a promising feedstock for sustainable electricity production using fuel cell technologies. In this monograph, we focus on the electricity generation in fuel cells that are operated at high temperatures with high efficiency using lignocellulosic biomass-derived fuels. More specifically, we discussed biomass conversion coupled solid oxide fuel cell and direct carbon fuel cell. The state of the art in technology development, as well as challenges, is outlined and perspectives on future development are provided.