‏‎‏‎utopia has, for four centuries, accompanied that hope of progress and that striving for betterment. it now straggles against a widespread sense that this has been an illusion, or an impossible dream. the utopian idea can never entirely disappear, but utopia as a form of the social imagination has clearly weakened. if it cannot instill its vision in the public consciousness, the consequences...

many mobile and off-grid devices include electronics and other electrical consumers like servo drives, which need a quite low supply power. since the price for photovoltaic modules drops continuously, photovoltaic power supply is interesting in more and more applications. in solar powered systems, a battery is needed to store energy for the night and cloudy periods. the power electronics of suc...

abstract global financial crisis has created too many problems in relations among governments. among these problems, the issue of global monetary management, more than every time in the past four decades, has been moved in the center of international economic attentions. a problem which is specially known with the monetary hostility between united states and public republic of china. where ar...

in the first part of this thesis we explored wetting and its dynamics for small droplets. first, we showed how a simple feature of water droplets on a surface, i.e. laplace pressure, can be exploited to build a micropump. we investigated capillary pumping in microchannels both experimentally and numerically. putting two droplets of different sizes at the in/outlet of a microchannel, will ge...