This brief outlines the most recent advances in the production of polyols and polyurethanes from renewable resources, mainly vegetable oils, lignocellulosic biomass, starch, and protein. The typical processes for the production of polyols from each of the above mentioned feedstocks are introduced and the properties of the resultant polyols and polyurethanes are also discussed.
This open access book deals with imaging of the abdomen and pelvis, an area that has seen considerable advances over the past several years, driven by clinical as well as technological developments. The respective chapters, written by internationally respected experts in their fields, focus on imaging diagnosis and interventional therapies in abdominal and pelvic disease; they cover all relevan…
This book describes recent theoretical findings relevant to bilevel programming in general, and in mixed-integer bilevel programming in particular. It describes recent applications in energy problems, such as the stochastic bilevel optimization approaches used in the natural gas industry. New algorithms for solving linear and mixed-integer bilevel programming problems are presented and explained.
The Special Issue aims to provide a complete exploration of the scientific principles related to processing, fermentation/malting, and nutrition of cereal grains. It also describes their physical and chemical characteristics and explains how these properties relate to health and nutritional value of the final grain-based products. Indeed, while grains remain the world’s largest food yield—w…
This book describes the coming about and first results of the AiREAS "healthy city" cooperative in the city of Eindhoven and Province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. AiREAS is an initiative focused on the multidisciplinary co-creation of healthy cities using the core human value of human health and air quality as guiding principle for profound regional innovation. The unique group process …
The technologies currently employed for modeling complex systems, such as aircraft, spacecraft, or infrastructures, are sufficient for system description, but do not allow deriving knowledge about the modeled systems. This work provides the means to describe space systems in a way that allows automating activities such as deriving knowledge about critical parts of the system’s design, evaluat…
This book covers all aspects of aesthetic breast surgery in an instructive, step-by-step format. The descriptions of procedures are completely up to date, encompassing newly introduced techniques and recent modifications of established techniques. Individual parts of the book are devoted to breast augmentation, mastopexy, and breast reduction. Detailed consideration is also given to risks and c…
Abiotic stress adversely affects crop production worldwide, decreasing average yields for most of the crops to 50%. Among various abiotic stresses affecting agricultural production, drought stress is considered to be the main source of yield reduction around the globe. Due to an increasing world population, drought stress will lead to a serious food shortage by 2050. The situation may become wo…
This book presents a selection of conference contributions from CARO’13 (Conference on Aerospace Robotics), which was held in Warsaw from July 1 to 3, 2013. It presents the most important and crucial problems of space automation in context of future exploration programs. These programs could involve such issues as space situational awareness program, planetary protection, exploitation of mine…
This book presents various aspects of salt and drought stress signaling in crops, combining physiological, biochemical, and molecular studies. Salt and drought stress are two major constraints on crop production worldwide. Plants possess several mechanisms to cope with the adverse effects of salt and drought. Among these mechanisms, stress signaling is very important, because it integrates and …