Recent Trends in Materials and Mechanical Engineering Materials, Mechatronics and Automation

Review from Ringgold Inc., ProtoView: This three-volume set collects selected, peer-reviewed papers from a January 2011 conference held in Shenzhen, China. The conference provided a forum for researchers, educators, engineers, and government officials involved in materials and mechanical engineering to disseminate research results and exchange views on future research directions. Volume 1 is dedicated to material engineering and mechanical engineering, with chapters on topics such as swelling and deswelling of a PH/thermosensitive hydrogel, techno-economic analysis of magnetic treatment of cobalt concrete, a plasticity model of extruded peanuts under mechanical pressing, and face image segmentation using a color information and saliency map. Volume 2 covers manufacturing and production processes, discussing areas such as design of a fiber-optic MEMs acoustic sensor system, a product life-cycle energy-consumption analysis method used in remanufacturing, and medical staff incentive mechanisms in China. Volume 3 describes automotive engineering and industry applications in areas such as trust analysis in social network community research, preparation and characterization of polypropylene/clay nanocomposites, and features extraction for printed numerals based on geometric properties.