During the 1940s, under the pseudonym of Will Stewart, Jack Williamson published a series of fictional stories describing a process for attaching atmospheres to planets in order to make them capable of sustaining life. ‘Terraforming,’ the term he coined for this activity was first picked up by other science fiction writers. Eventually, it captured the imagination of a small but zealous core of ...

This work presents a hybrid scheme combining the potentialities of neural networks for approximation purposes with the well-know theory and widespread industrial application of PID techniques. The neural network is trained based on measured data from the plant providing a way of scheduling between a set of PID controllers, a priori tuned in different operating points by means of Takahashi rules...

As interest for clean renewable electric power technologies grows, a number of parabolic trough power plants of various configurations are being considered for deployment around the globe. It is essential that plant designs be optimized for each specific application. The optimum design must consider the capital cost, operations and maintenance cost, annual generation, financial requirements, an...