Qing Xu

Intumescent Coating and Fire Protection of Steel Structures establishes the thermo insulation characteristics of intumescent coating under various fire and hydrothermal aging circumstances and shows how to predict the temperature elevation of steel structures protected with intumescent coatings in fires for avoiding structural damage.Introduced are the features and applications of intumescent coatings for protecting steel structures against fire. The constant effective thermal conductivity is defined and employed to simplify the quantification for the thermo-resistance of intumescent coatings. An experimental investigation into the hydrothermal aging effects on insulative properties of intumescent coatings is presented, as well as the influence of topcoat on insulation and aging of intumescent coatings. Also described is a practical method for calculating the temperature of the protected steel structures with intumescent coatings in order to evaluate the fire safety of a structure.The book is aimed at fire and structural engineers, as well as researchers and students concerned with the protection of steel structures.

Intumescent Coating and Fire Protection of Steel Structures establishes the thermo insulation characteristics of intumescent coating under various fire and hydrothermal aging circumstances and shows how to predict the temperature elevation of steel structures protected with intumescent coatings in fires for avoiding structural damage.Introduced are the features and applications of intumescent coatings for protecting steel structures against fire. The constant effective thermal conductivity is defined and employed to simplify the quantification for the thermo-resistance of intumescent coatings. An experimental investigation into the hydrothermal aging effects on insulative properties of intumescent coatings is presented, as well as the influence of topcoat on insulation and aging of intumescent coatings. Also described is a practical method for calculating the temperature of the protected steel structures with intumescent coatings in order to evaluate the fire safety of a structure.The book is aimed at fire and structural engineers, as well as researchers and students concerned with the protection of steel structures.

Information Theory (IT) tools, widely used in many scientific fields such as engineering, physics, genetics, neuroscience, and many others, are also useful transversal tools in image processing. In this book, we present the basic concepts of IT and how they have been used in the image processing areas of registration, segmentation, video processing, and computational aesthetics. Some of the approaches presented, such as the application of mutual information to registration, are the state of the art in the field. All techniques presented in this book have been previously published in peer-reviewed conference proceedings or international journals. We have stressed here their common aspects, and presented them in an unified way, so to make clear to the reader which problems IT tools can help to solve, which specific tools to use, and how to apply them. The IT basics are presented so as to be self-contained in the book. The intended audiences are students and practitioners of image processing and related areas such as computer graphics and visualization. In addition, students and practitioners of IT will be interested in knowing about these applications. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Information Theory Basics / Image Registration / Image Segmentation / Video Key Frame Selection / Informational Aesthetics Measures / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies