Actuators are the key to allowing machines to become more sophisticated and perform complex tasks that were previously done by humans, providing motion in a safe, controlled manner. As defined in this book, actuator design is a subset of mechanical design. It involves engineering the mechanical components necessary to make a product move as desired.

As cyber attacks become more frequent at all levels, the commercial aviation industry is gearing up to respond accordingly. Commercial Aviation and Cyber Security: A Critical Intersection is a timely contribution to those responsible for keeping aircraft and infrastructure safe. The book also collects important information on the best practices already adopted by other industries such as utilities, defense and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US.

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been widely implemented by the automotive industry as a productivity tool for design engineers to reduce both development time and cost. This essential work serves as a guide for FEA as a design tool and addresses the specific needs of design engineers to improve productivity. It provides a clear presentation that will help practitioners to avoid mistakes. Easy to use examples of FEA fundamentals are clearly presented that can be simply applied during the product development process.

Since the early seventies, the development of the automobile has been characterized by a steady increase in the deploymnet of onboard electronics systems and software. This trend continues unabated and is driven by rising end-user demands and increasingly stringent environmental requirements. Today, almost every function onboard the modern vehicle is electronically controlled or monitored.

Battery Fires: Why They Happen and How They Happen was written to assist those interested in this type of incident understand how automotive fires develop, spread and the damage they cause, using both deductive and inductive reasoning. The main focus of the book resides in looking at differences in failure modes between DC and AC systems, general types of battery and electrical failure modes leading to fire, how to interpret electrical fire, determination of the primary failed part, and other skills the investigating engineer will require to perform technical failure mode analysis.

The ability to successfully predict industrial product performance during service life provides benefits for producers and users. This book addresses methods to improve product quality, reliability, and durability during the product life cycle, along with methods to avoid costs that can negatively impact profitability plans. The methods presented can be applied to reducing risk in the research and design processes and integration with manufacturing methods to successfully predict product performance. This approach incorporates components that are based on simulations in the laboratory. The results are combined with in-field testing to determine degradation parameters. These approaches result in improvements to product quality, performance, safety, profitability, and customer satisfaction.