Bücher veröffentlicht von Mdpi AG

This book reprints articles from the Special Issue "Industrial Applications: New Solutions for the New Age" published online in the open-access journal Machines (ISSN 2075-1702). This book consists of twelve published articles. This special edition belongs to the "Mechatronic and Intelligent Machines" section.

The advancements in research related to heat transfer has gathered much attention in recent decades following the quest for efficient thermal systems, interdisciplinary studies involving heat transfer, and energy research. Heat transfer, a fundamental transport phenomenon, has been considered one of the critical aspects for the development and advancement of many modern applications, including cooling, thermal systems which contain symmetry analysis, energy conservation and storage, and symmetry-preserving discretization of heat transfer in a complex turbulent flow. The objective of this book is to present recent advances, as well as up-to-date progress in all areas of heat transfer in engineering and its influence on emerging technologies.

Ensuring microbiological safety in the food (of animal origin) chain is a challenging task due to the complex interactions among animals, humans and the environment. However, technological and analytical advances in recent years have provided a broader insight into microbiological hazards in the food chain and risk assessment. The objective of the proposed Special Issue "Study of Microbiological Safety in the Food Chain" was therefore to obtain scientific papers addressing microbiological hazards in the food chain, such as bacterial antimicrobial resistance, bacterial or fungal spoilage of foods, the antimicrobial potential of the indigenous microbiota, the aminogenic or amine-reducing capacity of the microbiota, and papers that apply novel methods to study the food microbiome to discover potential, previously unknown microbial hazards. This Special Issue of the journal Processes entitled "Study of Microbiological Safety in the Food Chain" consists of nine research papers and one review paper. Four papers focus on the microbiological aspects of milk and dairy products, three on meat and meat products, two on eggs, and one on various market foods. The microorganisms of interest were species of lactobacilli, enterococci and molds, Yersinia enterocolitica, Bacillus cereus and the general microbiota in certain foods.

Biocultural restoration is a process by which the various connections between humanity and nature, as well as between People and Place are revived to restore the health and function of social-ecological systems. This collection explores the subject of biocultural restoration and does so within the context of Hawaiʻi, the most remote archipelago on the planet. The Hawaiian Renaissance, which started in the 1970s, has led to a revival of Hawaiian language, practices, philosophy, spirituality, knowledge systems, and systems of resource management. Many of the leading Indigenous and local scholars of Hawaiʻi who were born into the time of the Hawaiian Renaissance contributed to this collection. More than a third of the authors are of Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry; each paper had at least one Indigenous Hawaiian author, and several papers had a Hawaiian lead author, making this the largest collection to date of scientific publications authored by Indigenous Hawaiians (Kānaka ʻŌiwi). In addition, the majority of authors are women, and two of the papers had 100 percent authorship by women. This collection represents a new emphasis in applied participatory research that involves academics, government agencies, communities and both private and non-profit sectors.

Dear Readers, Oncolytic Viruses (OV) are self-propagating agents that can selectively induce the lysis of cancer cells while sparing normal tissues. OV-mediated cancer cell death is often immunogenic and triggers robust anticancer immune responses and immunoconversion of tumor microenvironments. This makes oncolytic virotherapy a promising new form of immunotherapy and OVs ideal candidates for combination therapy with other anticancer agents, including other immunotherapeutics. There are more than 40 OVs from nine different families in clinical development and many more at the preclinical stage. Each OV has its own unique characteristics, its pros and cons. Although herpes simplex virus is currently the lead clinical agent, a real champion among the OVs has not yet emerged, justifying the continuous development and optimization of these agents. This book, "Oncolytic Virus Immunotherapy", summarizes the state-of-the-art and gives a comprehensive overview of the OV arena with a particular focus on new trends, directions, challenges, and opportunities.

Flows of thermal origin and heat transfer problems are central in a variety of disciplines and industrial applications. The present book entitled Thermal Flows consists of a collection of studies by distinct investigators and research groups dealing with different types of flows relevant to both natural and technological contexts. Both reviews of the state-of-the-art and new theoretical, numerical and experimental investigations are presented, which illustrate the structure of these flows, their stability behavior, and the possible bifurcations to different patterns of symmetry and/or spatiotemporal regimes. Moreover, different categories of fluids are considered (liquid metals, gases, common fluids such as water and silicone oils, organic and inorganic transparent liquids, and nanofluids). This information is presented under the hope that it will serve as a new important resource for physicists, engineers and advanced students interested in the physics of non-isothermal fluid systems; fluid mechanics; environmental phenomena; meteorology; geophysics; and thermal, mechanical and materials engineering.

MicroRNAs are the best representatives of the non-coding part of the genome and their functions are mostly linked to their target genes. During the process of carcinogenesis, both dysregulation of microRNAs and their target genes can explain the development of the disease. However, most of the target genes of microRNAs have not yet been elucidated. In this book, we add new information related to the functions of microRNAs in various tumors and their associated targetome.

The proton exchange membrane fuel cell is an electrochemical energy conversion device, which transforms a fuel such as hydrogen and an oxidant such as oxygen in ambient air into electricity with heat and water byproducts. The device is more efficient than an internal combustion engine because reactants are directly converted into energy through a one-step electrochemical reaction. Fuel cells combined with water electrolyzers, which electrochemically split water into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable energy sources such as solar, mitigate global warming concerns with reduced carbon dioxide emissions. This collection of papers covers recent advancements in fuel cell technology aimed at reducing cost, improving performance, and extending durability, which are perceived as crucial for a successful commercialization. Almost all key materials, as well as their integration into a cell, are discussed: the bus plates that collect the electrical current, the gas diffusion medium that distributes the reactants over catalysts promoting faster reactions, and the membrane separating oxygen and hydrogen gases and closing the electrical circuit by transporting protons. Fuel cell operation below the freezing point of water and with impure reactant streams, which impacts durability, is also discussed.

Block copolymers with crystallizable blocks have moved into the focus of current research, owing to their unique self-assembly behaviour and properties. New synthetic concepts give, for example, even access to tetrablock copolymers with four crystalline blocks, bio-based thermoplastic elastomers (e.g., based on ABA triblock copolymers with poly(L-lactide) (PLLA) hard segments), and allow new, exciting insights into the interplay of microphase separation and crystallization in controlling self-assembly in bulk (confined vs. break-out crystalliza┬¡tion).Concerning self-assembly in solution, crystallization-driven self-assembly (CDSA) paved the way to a myriad of crystalline-core micellar structures and hierarchical super┬¡structures that were not accessible before via self-assembly of fully amorphous block copolymers. This allows for the production of cylindrical micelles with defined lengths, length distribution, and corona chemistries (block type or patchy corona), as well as branched micelles and fascinating micellar superstructures (e.g., 2D lenticular platelets, scarf-shaped micelles, multidimensional micellar assemblies, and cross and "windmill"-like supermicelles).This Special Issue brings together new developments in the synthesis and self-assembly of block copolymers with crystallizable blocks and also addresses emerging applications for these exciting materials. It includes two reviews on CDSA and eight contributions spanning from membranes for gas separation to self-assembly in bulk and solution.

The mixture of data in real-life exhibits structure or connection property in nature. Typical data include biological data, communication network data, image data, etc. Graphs provide a natural way to represent and analyze these types of data and their relationships. Unfortunately, the related algorithms usually suffer from high computational complexity, since some of these problems are NP-hard. Therefore, in recent years, many graph models and optimization algorithms have been proposed to achieve a better balance between efficacy and efficiency. This book contains some papers reporting recent achievements regarding graph models, algorithms, and applications to problems in the real world, with some focus on optimization and computational complexity.