Best Polymers & Textiles

The mills at Wicksbridge are imaginary, but their planning, construction, and operation are quite typical of mills developed in New England throughout the nineteenth century. In Mill , a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, David Macaulay pays tribute to the historically important mills of 19th-century New England. Using close-up pen-and-ink illustrations, Macaulay thoroughly explains the Yankee ingenuity that went into the elaborate process of running machines that were generated by the flow of water.

A Perfect Red recounts the colorful history of cochineal, a legendary red dye that was once one of the world's most precious commodities. "Elusive, expensive and invested with powerful symbolism, red cloth became the prize possession of the wealthy and well-born," Greenfield writes in her intricate, fully researched and stylishly written history of Europe's centuries-long clamor for cochineal, a dye capable of producing the "brightest, strongest red the Old World had ever seen." Striving to maintain a trade monopoly, Spain fiercely guarded the secrets of cochineal cultivation in Mexico and only after centuries of speculation (was the red powder derived from plant or animal?). Greenfield recounts the wild, clandestine attempts by adventurer naturalists to cultivate both the cochineal insect and its host plant, nopal, beyond their native Mexico, acts of folly driven by the desire for scientific fame and commercial profit. Native to Mexico, the scale insect cochineal was first harvested as a dyestuff by the ancient Aztecs, and once its properties were discovered by European conquistadors, it became the quarry in an international race to obtain a monopoly on its production.

But a century into our love affair with plastic, we’re starting to realize it’s not such a healthy relationship. Plastic points the way toward a new creative partnership with the material we love to hate but can’t seem to live without. The absurdity of this experiment became clear ten seconds into the appointed morning when I walked into the bathroom and realized the toilet seat was plastic. In the ‘40s, pollsters found that "cellophane" was considered one of the most beautiful words in the English language, after "mother" and "memory." By the 1970s, when I was a teenager, plastic had acquired a much worse reputation; it was the stuff of pink flamingos, shiny suits, tacky furniture. When I started the book in 2008, I took a pair of plastic grocery bags and tacked one onto the fence in my backyard and tied the other to the branch of a nearby tree. I gained a better understanding of how plastic transformed fields like medicine, or transportation, or construction, making it possible to replace, say, a failing heart valve or build Boeing’s new super-lightweight Dreamliner plane. Early in my research I attended a convention on eco-friendly construction and discovered that "green" builders love Styrofoam because it’s a great insulator and is long-lasting. Q: With huge environmental issues like climate change or loss of biodiversity facing us, why should we care about plastic? Yet a lot of it is going to trivial one-time uses, which is an incredible waste of a very valuable resource—and one that could be very useful in helping us address the problems posed by climate change. But I also think how we use plastic is symptom and symbol of significant issues, like our dependence on finite fossil fuels, or our daily exposure to hazardous chemicals. Talking about plastics is really a conversation about just how deeply we want to transform the natural world, what kind of legacy we want to leave to the generations that succeed us. Two years into my research, I was making tea one day when I suddenly realized my electric teakettle was made of plastic. Given what I had learned about the ways heat can accelerate the breakdown of polymer bonds, which allows chemicals to leach out, I decided to swap it out for a metal teakettle. Reuse where possible: Give that sandwich baggie a week’s workout; use that empty yogurt tub for leftovers.

You need Composites Manufacturing: Materials, Product, and Process Engineering. "Sanjay Mazumdar's book entitled Composites Manufacturing is intended to serve as a textbook for college students and/or a self-study took for engineers and professionals in the composites industry...The book is well written and illustrated, logically organized and easy to follow. -Jovan Mijovic, Professor, Polytechnic University "a very good book that provides a comprehensive coverage for many aspects of Manufacturing of CompositesFor a newcomer, this book provides a good introduction into the many facets of Composites Manufacturing that needs to be known." -John Marks, Vice President and General Manager, COI Materials Inc., San Diego, California, USA" Provides a broad overview of the topics of composites manufacturingPulls together key references and provides guidelines to help navigate through this complex fieldCovers many topics not often covered elsewhere, such as production planning, cost, and recycling" -Timothy Gutowski, Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA "This is a good, basic introduction to the field of composites manufacturing and product development.

Worked problems are included in the discussion of each mechanism, and "common error alerts" are scattered throughout the text to warn readers about pitfalls and misconceptions that bedevil students. The author provides the student a Web site that includes the detailed mechanisms for every problem in the book, each of which includes explanation and commentary, and the answer set, when printed, exceeds 250 pages! The next advanced course I teach will use The Art of Writing Reasonable Reaction Mechanisms with the goal that students will be able to posit a plausible mechanism for any new reaction that they encounter. The Art of Writing Reasonable Reaction Mechanisms might just change the way you do things." "The Art of Writing Reasonable Organic Reaction Mechanisms has an entirely different scope, dedicated to teaching the application of first principles to the construction of organic mechanisms. The author provides the student a Web site that includes the detailed mechanisms for every problem in the book … . "This text shows how to write a reasonable mechanism for an organic chemical transformation. "Robert Grossman in his book attempts to familiarize the student with the awesome power of reaction mechanisms … . "The book entitled ‘The Art of Writing Reasonable Organic Reaction Mechanisms’ … shows how to write a reasonable mechanism for an organic chemical transformation. … The book will be useful to students and researchers in intermediate organic chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, and inorganic chemistry." Students will enormously benefit from using the principles and concepts in this book in writing their own mechanisms."

A globally-renowned materials scientist, Miodownik has spent his life exploring objects as ordinary as an envelope and as unexpected as concrete cloth, uncovering the fascinating secrets that hold together our physical world. In Stuff Matters , Miodownik entertainingly examines the materials he encounters in a typical morning, from the steel in his razor and the graphite in his pencil to the foam in his sneakers and the concrete in a nearby skyscraper. From the teacup to the jet engine, the silicon chip to the paper clip, the plastic in our appliances to the elastic in our underpants, our lives are overflowing with materials. “ Stuff Matters is about hidden wonders, the astonishing properties of materials we think boring, banal and unworthy of attention...It’s possible this science and these stories have been told elsewhere, but like the best chocolatiers, Miodownik gets the blend right." "Miodownik, a materials scientist, explains the history and science behind things such as paper, glass, chocolate and concrete with an infectious enthusiasm." "Materials scientist Miodownik intertwines humorous vignettes of daily life in London with subatomic behavior to explain the feats of engineering that brought us samurai swords, skyscrapers, pool balls and even chocolate. From concrete in Roman architecture to atom-thick graphene, Miodownik builds on a historical framework to give readers an idea of future applications. " Stuff Matters makes the seemingly banal objects of our everyday lives into an endless source of wonder, dreams and possibility." Its anecdotes, inviting prose and unusual chapter titles introduce both the author and his field of research, materials science." "Concrete, chocolate, paper, porcelain; this is a fascinating and informative account of the ‘stuff’ of our everyday lives." "[A] wonderful account of the materials that have made the modern world…Miodownik writes well enough to make even concrete sparkle." "A compact, intense guided tour through a handful of physical materials, from concrete to chocolate, revealing what makes them profoundly affect our lives...[Miodownik] writes with enthusiasm, empathy and gratitude, making us care for concrete or foam as much as for Mr. Darcy or the Artful Dodger...[ Stuff Matters ] puts the wonder and strangeness back into all the truly magical stuff that comprises our everyday reality." The author explores the worlds of the grandiose as he watches the construction of the Shard in London, Europe’s tallest building; and the miniscule, as he examines how small pores can lead to fractures in terra cotta, but similar fractures can be stopped in plaster (like that in a cast) by applying it over cloth. Miodownik introduces enough chemistry to explain, as his title suggests, the stuff that matters, but relates the science in such a way that the book should be accessible to all readers.

We guide you through choosing an IDE, as well as the various elements of coding in JavaScript. Introduction to JavaScript For newcomers to JavaScript we look at what the language has to offer, its origin and design goals, features and capabilities, as well as JavaScript based frameworks, before stepping into more in-depth topics. Basics of JavaScript Writing Your First Program, Step-By-Step Basic Program Structure Which IDE to Choose Features and Uses of JavaScript Sample Applications Data Types Variables Operators Type Conversions Numbers Strings Booleans Working with Dates.

Philip Ball's introduction describes Gordon's career and the impact of his innovations in materials research, while also discussing how the field has evolved since Gordon wrote this enduring example of first-rate scientific communication. "Princeton has brought to the public a highly readable treatise on the science of materials that emphasizes the strength of chemical and physical bonds, crystal structure, and cracks….

Bridigum discusses gas, stick, wire-feed (MIG and TIG), even brazing, completing each section with a series of exercises that fully illustrate the skills he has covered. Todd Bridigum is a welding instructor at Minneapolis Community Technical College.

Foundations & Concrete Work , with its fresh new design and completely updated content, will secure its reputation as the most respected, widely followed how-to guide for dedicated pros and passionate amateurs. Since 1981 Fine Homebuilding has been providing information and inspiration to everyone who cares about quality home improvement and construction.

Perhaps the chief reason for this is that in addition to all the customary elementary material on the subject (i.e., clear instructions to the fundamentals of tension, torsion, bending, compound stresses, deflection of beams, etc.). This material is presented in starred sections (which may be omitted on a first reading without interrupting the flow of the presentation) and includes a full treatment of the Mohr circle and its application to the determination of moments of inertia and strains as well as stresses; a lucid elementary presentation of the theory of the center of shear; and one of the few elementary presentations of the theory of the center of shear; and one of the few elementary discussions of the "Myosotis" method of calculating beam deflections, a method which often possesses considerable advantages over the more usual methods involving moment-area or the differential equation of bending. J. P. Den Hartog: The Reprint Engineer J. P. Den Hartog (1901–1989), who taught for most of his career at MIT, was one of the founders of the Dover reprint program in engineering.