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This volume is concerned with the understanding and modeling ofcombustion in high speed flows. The exploration of a dual approachcombining asymptotic and numerical methods for the analysis of themodels is particularly emphasized. The models reflect the basicphysical phenomena in SCRAMJETs and oblique detonation-wave engines(ODWE). This collection of papers from leading researchers presents anoverview of the state-of-the-art of current research and will be avaluable tool for scientists and students working in the area ofcombustion in high speed propulsion. ... Read more

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This book represents the updated English version of the German edition from 1984. Carbon free fuels, currently considered unconventional, will gain more and more importance in the future. Hydrogen is, in the longterm, available in unlimited amounts and can be produced from water by means of nuclear or regenerative primary energy. The book gives a description of projects, based on liquid hydrogen as a fuel, performed in the last decade. The present state of development on hydrogen liquefaction and distribution, liquid hydrogen on board storage, refilling systems and fuel conditioning system is described. Because surface bound vehicles in the future will still use internal combustion engines - electrical drive will remain reserved for special applications - the book includes most recent results on internal combustion engine operation by use of cryogenic hydrogen, as well as preliminary experience made in liquid hydrogen vehicles accidents. Not only specialists in cryogenic technology, internal combustion engines or in energy technology, but also people, interested in environmental questions will find information on the leading and pioneering work performed in the last two decades in the US, Japan, and Europe. ... Read more

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This volume contains the 55 papers presented at the 8thInternational Symposium on Unsteady Aerodynamics and Aeroelasticity ofTurbomachines. They present the latest developments in the field andprovide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the state of theart in experimental, numerical and analytical research in the domainof aeroelasticity in turbomachines. Recent experimental results are discussed in depth and papers coveringthe whole range of prediction models, from analytical to fullythree-dimensional viscous, coupled fluid-structure models, areincluded. Steady-state flow conditions of modern turbomachines havetoday reached a state of maturity. However, the blades in the machinesare constantly required to be more effective, simultaneously as weightand manufacturing costs must decrease. Together this gives moresignificance to unsteady flow phenomena. The latest developments inunsteady aerodynamic and aeroelastic problems in turbomachines aretreated within this volume. The experienced designer, the researcher and the new graduate studentwill all find various parts of the book extremely stimulating. ... Read more

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Presents the current state of knowledge with regard to the long term availability of conventional transportation fuels, based on fossil resources, and the environmental effects of fossil fuel use. DLC: Hydrogen as fuel. ... Read more

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With major structural changes will need to be thoroughly reexamined. This book discusses decision making for problems where a particular decision affects the options available at the next decision time. The deregulation of the electric utility industry will shift the emphasis from a cost-based to a price-based approach; the resulting occuring in the electric power industry, many long-standing ways of operation increase in uncertainty requires that a stochastic approach be adopted for optimal decision-making. This monograph covers a wide range of topics including dynamic programming, ordinal optimization, price modelling and forecasting, future market decisions, reserve market decisions and decisions in a congested market place. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Sophistry
The unit commitment problem is stated using math formulas which contain 28 symbols.To understand the formulas, it is necessary to memorize the definition of each symbol.If you have the patience, you can translate the formulas into something coherent in about 3 hours.The result is rather straight forward and forms a basis for understanding which, theoretically, is the purpose for which the book was written.

For those who are already familiar with the symbols, see the review by the reader from Yonkers.

Waste of time and money
This text appears to have been a technical report or a PhD thesis that was modified to become a book. The authors did their best to stretch the page count by providing basic information that is generally known by most senior-level students in electrical engineering or operations research. Even after this exercise, the "real" page count is 108. The remainder of the book was made possible by copying several standard formulas from a statistics book, by downloading and plotting some of PJM's data (isn't the Internet great?), and by providing an amateurish source code for some of the material suggested in the book for the single-unit case.

The book begins by describing the unit commitment problem, referencing a total of 9 journal articles (Page 9), but skipping most of the important references in this area. It is strange to discuss unit commitment (in a book) without mentioning the original work of Muckstadt and Koenig (1977), Merlin and Sandrin (1983), or that of Zhuang and Galiana (1988), to name a few. The authors quickly discount all previous work as being inadequate as it does not handle many of the important elements of a system (leading you to believe that they are going to discuss these issues), such as network constraints or losses. I suggest that they refer to "The Generalized Unit Commitment Problem" by Baldick, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1995, for a discussion on this subject. I also strongly recommend that Mr. Allen and Ms. Ilic obtain a copy of (the outdated) "Unit Commitment Literature Synopsis" by Sheble and Fahd, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1994. It may serve as a starter on this subject. The most impressive aspect of this book is its depth, or lack there of. The authors manage to provide their deep knowledge of the unit commitment problem and its solution techniques in less than 5 pages.

Chapter 3 describes the unit commitment in a deregulated environment in the most simplistic fashion possible (indicating the authors' lack of any true experience in this business) resulting in six pages of basic material. In chapter 4, the reader is presented with a pathetic review of dynamic programming. Chapter 5 is even more interesting. The authors assume a known price process in the market and optimize each individual generating unit based on these prices. They discuss (in less than 7 pages) the use of dynamic programming to solve the unit commitment (in reality a single generator) with and without generation limits using normal and lognormal price distributions. For those of us teaching dynamic programming to senior or master level students, the three models could serve as a homework assignment. If you are a "quant" on the trading floor, you may want to derive these formulas during your lunch hour.

Chapter 6 is entitled "Price Process of Electricity". Thanks to the statisticians of this world, the reader is bombarded with endless tests and distributions describing electricity prices. The authors skillfully demonstrate their ability to use Matlab to draw a large number of graphs.

I must admit that I stopped reading when I reached Chapter 7 "Computational Complexity of the Unit Commitment". The authors say that the dynamic programming is widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems "however, it also has the disadvantage of non-polynomial (NP) growth of operation count with respect to problem size." They refer the reader to the book by Bertsekas on Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control. The authors abruptly shy away from discussing this subject. Given the depth of the book, I would have expected a proof showing that the problem being discussed (the unit commitment) is NP. It is not sufficient to say that their formulation suffers from exponential growth. If the matter is so simple, I have several problems that I modeled as dynamic programs and would like to claim that they are NP (including a couple of linear programs that I solved using dynamic programming as I was lazy to call the LP solver).

In summary, the book is a waste of time and money. It is a sad demonstration of how tenure and graduation pressure can lead people to publish garbage. If you need to learn about this subject, I suggest searching the web for articles related to deregulation. Then, you can buy Bertsekas's book (or refer to your notes from college), use your good old Schaum's Series on statistics, and derive the results that truly fit your problem.

Review
Excellent book.Definite keeper for anyone working in the market.Appreciate the source code and data which backs up the paper.For those who believe in cost based world, get this book and compare your results

useness,new,needed by dev-ing country! If Free,Best!
useness,new,needed by dev-ing country! If Free,Best ... Read more

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This collection of essays offers a detailed look at stress factors affecting airline professionals, and the human factors that are becoming increasingly recognized as major causes of airplane mishaps. Among the topics discussed are the physiological stresses of flight, deregulation in the U.S. and Canada and its effect on pilots, mandatory retirement and age discrimination, legal and psychological issues concerning impaired pilots, and factors in qualifying for medical certificates. The contributors provide a representative overview of an industry that has gone from complete regulation to being a cutthroat competitive environment. ... Read more

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"This veteran analyst offers an appraisal of investment opportunities in a wide array of space-related activities. NASA will no longer be a major factor in the commercialization of space. . . . There are a few futuristic projections, such as mining asteroids by robots and collecting antimatter, but the author is more concerned with the application of current or near-future high technology, i.e., products like ELVs (inexpensive expendable launch vehicles), and services with demonstrably large market potential, such as a remote sensing satellite network that could be subsribed to by every personal computer owner on earth." Choice ... Read more

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Communicating successfully is crucial if an organization is to survive and recover from a crisis. Focusing on the airline industry and some of the most recent headline-making disasters, Dr. Ray looks at organizational crises, the communications strategies employed by organizations when responding to crises, and the factors that influence the effectiveness for this strategic communication. Her three-stage model of crisis stages provides a comprehensive understanding of the significant factors that affect the success of communicating in crisis situations. She shows how strategic communication is best understood and developed from a broad frame of reference, and how specific communication choices must emerge from specific situations. Corporate communications specialists at all levels in the private and public sectors both, plus executives with other management responsibilities, will find Dr. Ray's book informative, useful, and fascinating reading. ... Read more

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Over the past decade, the United States Air Force has faced avariety of unforeseen challenges.On the one hand, a significant portion ofthe force has been engaged in a range of contingency as well as peacekeepingoperations.On the other hand, a once-robust economy led many to leave theforce in unexpected numbers during the 1990s.The result has been amismatch between Air Force taskings and available personnel.This reportoutlines the findings of a study whose objective was twofold:first, toreview the methodology that the Air Force uses to determine active-dutyenlisted manpower requirements in aircraft maintenance; and second, toinvestigate whether these requirements and their resulting authorizationshave been underestimated.Toward this goal, the study assesses theLogistics Composite Model (LCOM), a statistical simulation model that theAir Force uses to gauge direct maintenance man-hours, as well as the AirForce-wide regulations that establish ceilings on available hours.Thereport concludes that maintenance manpower requirements are in factunderestimated in the Air Force, largely because the service's manpowerprocesses do not adequately account for all the tasks that maintainers inthe field must undertake.Accordingly, the report recommends that Air Forcepolicies and analytical tools be reexamined and appropriately refined tobetter reflect maintenance manpower needs. ... Read more

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Change--in international relations, in technology, and in society as a whole--has become the idiom of our age.One example of these changes has been an increasing recognition of the value of air and space assets for handling nearly every contingency from disaster relief to war and,onsequently, increasing demand for such assets. These developments have created both challenges and opportunities for the U.S. Air Force. This, the fourth volume in the Strategic Appraisal series, draws on the expertise of researchers from across RAND to explore both the challenges and opportunities that the U.S. Air Force faces as it strives to support the nation's interests in a challenging technological and security environment.Contributors examine the changing roles of air and space forces in U.S.national security strategy, the implications of new systems and technologiesfor military operations, and the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. securitystrategy. Contributors also discuss the status of major modernizationefforts within the Air Force, and the "bill of health" of the Air Force, asmeasured by its readiness to undertake its missions both today and in thefuture. ... Read more

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This text is a collection of papers from the 2001 ASME Wind Energy Symposium. Topics covered include structures, design and manufacturing; systems and controls; aerodynamics; testing; and modelling and codes. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

James E. Dewar, "To the End of the Solar System"
This is an important book about a topic that is often unjustly overlooked.Nuclear rockets are significant because they represent the only proved approach to gaining significant improvements in the performance of rockets to be used for space propulsion.I hope to write about this and if I do, I will use this book as my principal reference.

Thomas A. Heppenheimer

Excellent for anyone interested in space exploration or history.
This book is mesmerizing for anyone who is interested in either the U.S. political process or space exploration.The author spent his working life at DOE immersed in both politics and nuclear materials management, and much of Dewar's description of the way things worked in Congress back in the 1950's and 1960's is still the case today.While the author sometimes promotes his topic, he delineates his opinions carefully and gives equal space to opposing arguments.The book is copious with footnotes that are in and of themselves an excellent resource.

By the end of World War II, both rocket scientists and preeminent physicists like Leo Szilard and Stan Ulam had realized that although it looked impossibly difficult to develop, only nuclear energy could make manned space exploration beyond Earth orbit feasible.Nuclear reactors at that time were still huge and heavy, and nuclear weapons were only just barely feasible to carry on a large aircraft.Nonetheless, the physics of space travel was undeniable, then and now.Dewar mentions (and footnotes) a non-technical 1947 article by Luis Alvarez entitled, "There Is No Obvious or Simple Way in Which to Use Nuclear Energy For Spaceships" that made a long and objective assessment of the difficulties nuclear rockets entailed.At the time and up until Sputnik, rockets were a low priority for the United States.It was a young Dr. Robert Bussard who managed to convince a few people in the right places in 1953 that the difficulties could be overcome.Ultimately John von Neumann said that it should be examined as a precaution against the Russians developing one first.Mark Mills, assistant director of Livermore, came up with a way to achieve a workable design, and Herbert York, then-Livermore director (he later became director of DARPA), announced that he would form a division around it and staunchly supported nuclear thermal rockets for the remainder of his life.Norris Bradbury, director of Los Alamos, said that he would do the same, and a few years later the launch of Sputnik infused more cash into the project.The Cold War and the unrelenting support of several space supporters in Congress kept the project funded (along with Apollo) throughout the sixties, long enough to conquer Alvarez's list, right up until the Nixon administration defunded it along with much of the space program.

The technical reasons for developing nuclear rockets lie in gravity.Although we are able to send unmanned missions to other planets using chemical rockets, they must be highly expensive, multi-year affairs.Even though Apollo stretched the U.S. budget (approximately $150B in 2008 dollars), the Apollo missions were only feasible by using a multi-day gravitational slingshot process to help get our spacecraft to the Moon.A small 1960's-era nuclear thermal rocket can easily ascend to the Moon or Mars while keeping radiation exposure for astronauts to a minimum.

Today's rockets burn chemicals.Anybody who has ever built rockets, even just Estes rockets, has learned that almost all of a rocket's weight at launch is fuel.A large amount of effort is spent trying to leave just a few percent of the total weight of the rocket for payload, i.e. cargo.

Get more energy out of the fuel, and you're able to decrease the amount of fuel you carry.Now you can decrease the size of tanks and structure, and so the total weight of your rocket decreases, leading to a further decrease in fuel requirements.A small amount of weight saved means an extraordinary amount of fuel saved, and so the amount of energy in your fuel limits how far you can travel.

Weight and energy are issues for rocket engineers.Space radiation is a big issue for astronauts.For long missions very large amounts of shielding are necessary, not to mention more food and water.Radiation shielding tends to be made of materials like lead and concrete, so for example on a mission to Mars they very quickly begin to take up a significant portion of a rocket's cargo capacity.The mass drives up the fuel which drives up the mass again, etc.Because there are practical limits to the size of a space vehicle, the shielding requirement raises the mass and forces the mission duration to go up, which in turn requires more supplies and more shielding, which slows it down some more, and so on and so on.

Chemical rocket missions to the Moon the size of a Saturn V can take very little cargo and bring back almost none.Chemical rocket missions to anywhere else farther out stretch to years and multiple rockets.Huge manned multi-year space missions have thus far proven to be far beyond what any government has been willing to pay, because they require huge traveling space stations.They are also currently far beyond the reach of even the richest corporations.Even unmanned missions beyond low Earth orbit based on chemical rockets are either very expensive or incredibly slow.In contrast, manned nuclear-powered missions can be short and cheap.

No new chemicals are coming; the periodic table has been thoroughly explored since the early 1900's.If we want to send humans elsewhere in the solar system, chemical energy is insufficient, and only rockets powered by nuclear energy will do.

Nuclear rockets do much better than cutting rocket fuel requirements in half, as one of the other reviewers asserted.The ones invented in the 1960's made fast manned missions to anywhere in the solar system possible.This is not fanatic advocacy; it's simple physics.The research programs that succeeded in inventing them are one of the subjects of this book, and the incredible politics surrounding that research are another.

James Dewar wrote this book because by virtue of the fact that the programs were classified, very little has to date been published about them."To The End Of The Solar System" is the ONLY existing detailed history of the U.S. nuclear rocket program.It reveals that by 1968 the difficult problems of building a nuclear thermal rocket had been solved.The programs were cancelled not because of technical difficulties or radiation problems, but because at that time manned space exploration was a huge budget issue, and the Republican Party saw correctly that nuclear rockets were necessary to exploration.The Democratic Party had made manned space exploration an integral part of their party platform, and by stopping manned exploration the Republican party was able stymie the Democrats.Politics doesn't always make sense, but that's what happened.What people didn't foresee was that the nuclear rocket and manned space exploration were so thoroughly hamstrung that they would be crippled for (at least) 40 years.

The research and footnotes in this book are exhaustive.One of the surprising things you'll learn is that the nuclear rocket program was not all pork-barrel politics, as Jeff Bell, an avowed opponent of manned space exploration, has asserted.Many of the program's staunchest Congressional supporters stood to gain nothing by supporting it; they simply argued that manned space exploration was a noble goal.

All rocket designers deal with white-hot temperatures, but the biggest problem for nuclear rocket designers was fuel rods that needed to be exposed to these temperatures.Surprisingly, after just over a decade of research in high-temperature materials and nuclear physics, the test program had advanced to the point where the engines were ready to launch.By 1968 the engines were running for hours at a time, a feat unmatched in engine tests before or since.The release of small amounts of radioactive materials in space (where they would be used) was not an issue, but by 1970 enough progress had been made by the Y-12 researchers that they felt that the engines might safely be used in the upper atmosphere with no releases whatsoever.Before the new fuel rods could be tested and before they could be flown, the program was ended.

It must be stressed again that the nuclear rocket program was ended not for technical reasons, but because many people were alarmed at the cost of the Apollo program.Ending nuclear rockets was the best way to make sure that the multi-decade expense of supporting Lunar and Mars colonies did not arrive.

James Dewar believes fervently in manned space exploration, but even if you don't there is no better or more exhaustively-referenced book on this fascinating slice of U.S. history than this one.

Definitive Narrative History
Six million horsepower from a reactor the size of a 55 gallon drum. This was the promise of the ultimate in all-American 60's muscle - the nuclear thermal rocket engine. With it, you could send jumbo jet sized payloads to the Moon, or send a crew to Mars in 3 months.

James A. Dewar's exhaustively researched work (there are 91 pages of footnotes) shows both the technical and political sides of the 18 year effort to develop the nuclear rocket. Like the space program itself, the nuclear rocket program was a creature of the Washington political process.

While lacking the polish of a David McCullough, Dewar does a good job of introducing the cast of characters and their competing visions for America's technologic and social future.

Dewar's thesis is that the nuclear engine was feasible and would have revolutionized space travel, boosting mankind into a 2001 Space Odyssey. I found his viewpoint to be refreshing, especially in contrast to the dour visions of historians such as Richard Rhodes. He devotes Appendix D of the book to "safety and environmental aspects of testing."

Perhaps the most poignant vision one gets from reading the book is that of the turning of a page in American history. With the end of Apollo and the nuclear engine project in 1973 we go from an era of limitless promise, to an era of sharply limited outcomes.

A True Believer's History
I have been a big fan of the Nuclear Thermal Rocket for many years. In 1966 my family drove by the Jackass Flats test site and I still have vivid memories of the AEC carpools passing us at 100mph on their private freeway from Las Vegas, hard hats stacked next to the back windows of their government-issue Chevys.

As I learned more about this program in recent years, the advantages of nuclear rockets seemed less clear to me.Is the 2x reduction in propellant weight really worth the big increase in cost and danger of a white-hot nuclear reactor? This book confirms my growing suspicions that NTR was and is a bad idea.The bare facts make it clear that this technology wasn't worth the costs even in the nuclear-friendly 1950s.

One often sees the claim that NERVA had a flight-ready design at the time of cancellation in 1971.The detailed descriptions of the many reactor tests in this book make it clear that this really wasn't so.Despite a huge amount of research, the high-temperature graphite/uranium fuel elements in these reactors were still subject to considerable cracking, corrosion and erosion.It was considered a great milestone when a test reactor lost less than 100lbs of bomb-grade uranium blown out the nozzle, mostly in the form of gas or microscopic inhalable particles.

This shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone.The great nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez had pointed out the fundamental physical limitations of the H2/U-235 rocket engine in an obscure but unclassified journal as early as 1947.And the Rover/NERVA project was consistently opposed by every Presidential Science Adviser and every NASA Administrator right up to its final cancellation in 1971.Why then was so much public money wasted on a project that almost all competent observers thought was unwise?

This is the strongest aspect of Dewar's book.He has reconstructed in great detail the political deals that kept Rover and NERVA alive.It's a fascinating window into a past age of Congressional politics -- an age when a few powerful committee chairmen ruled the Hill with an iron fist, deciding billion-dollar research programs at all-night poker parties lubricated with large amounts of hard liquor.None of these men had any kind of technical education at all, and their decisions seem to have largely been based on pork barrel politics.It's no accident that the strongest supporter of NERVA was Sen. Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, home of Los Alamos where most of the NERVA funding ended up.

But I also wanted to learn all the technical details of the program, and in this area Dewar has come up short.He obtained a vast number of formerly-classifed internal project documents, but the information from them is not conveyed to the reader in a digestible form.Dewar has tried to water down the subject to make it understandable for a non-technical audience.This is really difficult to do in a complex field like fission reactor design, and some of his analogies and interpretations are oversimplified and downright misleading.A few tables summarizing the different reactor designs and their test histories would have been nice.

Dewar also adopts the annoying practice of summarizing lenghty policy documents in his own words, without including the original text in a appendix.On p.248-249, he even includes what seems to be a totally imaginary conversation between some of the major players in NERVA -- hardly an acceptable practice for serious historians.

Even worse, there are a few telling technical errors that make me doubt that Dewar understands nuclear physics very well. In an attack on anti-nuclear activists on p.209-210, he confuses Pu-239 with Pu-238.These isotopes have very different properties and safety problems.

But the biggest problem with this book is that the author is a true believer.He repeats as gospel truth all the claims made by pro-NERVA politicians, while expressing nothing but scorn for the opinions of highly qualified experts like Alvarez, Herbert York, and Jim Webb.When he states facts, he usually can be trusted.But his analysis and opinions are highly biased and untrustworthy.I hope somebody writes a better book on this topic someday -- but I'm keeping this one until that happens.

historical aspect in rocketry
Excellent book... a must read for anyone interested in space propulsion technology which needs a 'second look' to enable humans to bridge our Solar System in the future. ... Read more

Product Description
This text constitutes proceedings from the Annual Battery Conference on Applications and Advances, which took place in 1999. Topics covered include aircraft and military applications, methods of testing and evaluation, and battery selection and management. ... Read more