Books about Stabilisation from Amazon.com

The question of whether Western party systems were becoming more unstable and electorates more volatile had already become central to the study of modern European by the end of the 1970s. Much of the literature at the time stressed how Western Europe was experiencing a phase of party breakdown, dealignment and decay, and how traditional mass politics was in the process of transformation. In this first book-length analysis of the subject, Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair convincingly demonstrated how this emphasis on change had been largely misconceived and misplaced. This was the first systematic and conceptually sophisticated work to bring together the study of electoral change and cleavage persistence, and has since become one of the landmark volumes in the study of electoral politics in Europe. The authors examine patterns of electoral persistence and change in Western Europe between 1885 and 1985. They assess both what these patterns indicate with regard to the persistence of traditional cleavages, particularly the class cleavage, and how these patterns vary according to political, institutional and social factors. They analyse the various patterns of competition which have characterised elections across the different European countries and in different historical periods, and how cleavages can persist and re-emerge even in the face of widespread social change. They develop a sophisticated model of aggregate electoral change, in which national electorates are conceived as being torn between the stability brought about by cultural identities and organisational structures and the stimuli for change that are provoked by party competition and institutional change. Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research and is now reprinted for the first time in paperback.

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Price: $19.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This review covers a wide range of topics including thermal, thermo-oxidative, photochemical, photo-oxidative, chemical, mechanochemical, hydrolytic and biochemical degradation, as well as providing information on the relative efficiencies of the various stabiliser systems available. Also covered are the effect of various additives, such as dyes, fillers, flame retardants, etc., both on the overall mechanism of degradation and on the efficacy of the additives. Coverage includes all polyamides (at least those for which information is available) not just the better-known ones such as Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6. Depolymerisation recycling of polyamides is also discussed as this is regarded as controlled degradation..
Price: $141.42 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The impact of control system design on ship performance has been significant in different applications of ship motion control: course keeping, station keeping, roll stabilisation and vertical motion/riding control, diving, path following, etc. This monograph introduces ship motion control by studying the particular problems of control system design for course autopilots with rudder roll stabilisation and combined rudder–fin stabilisers. Ship Motion Control revisits the ingredients that make these control designs challenging and proposes a contemporary control system design approach to meet that challenge.

The key ingredients for a successful ship motion control system design are: 

• appropriate mathematical models of the ship and the disturbances;
• understanding of how performance will be assessed;
• knowledge of fundamental limitations that may prevent designs from achieving the desired performance.

The book is organised in four parts, the first three dealing with each of these and the fourth part addressing control system design.

Specific topics covered include:

• modelling and simulation of ocean waves;
• ship dynamics;
• models of actuators;
• ship roll stabilisation devices;
• ship motion performance;
• analysis of fundamental limitations for stabiliser control system design;
• constrained control design via optimisation;
• autopilot design using optimal control;
• wave filtering;
• control system design for autopilots with rudder roll stabilisation;
• control system design for integrated rudder-fin stabiliser.

Ship Motion Control will be of interest not only to the practising marine engineer but to the academic engaged in research into this important control problem, even if new to the area. It will also be an ideal source of reference for students and tutors involved with marine and control engineering courses.

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Price: $119.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is a highly original and revisionist analysis of British and American efforts to forge a stable Euro-Atlantic peace order between 1919 and the rise of Hitler. Patrick Cohrs argues that this order was not founded at Versailles but rather through the first 'real' peace settlements after World War I - the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno security pact of 1925. Crucially, both fostered Germany's integration into a fledgling transatlantic peace system, thus laying the only realistic foundations for European stability. What proved decisive was that key decision-makers drew lessons from the 'Great War' and Versailles' shortcomings. Yet Cohrs also re-appraises why they could not sustain the new order, master its gravest crisis - the Great Depression - and prevent Nazism's onslaught. Despite this ultimate failure, he concludes that the 'unfinished peace' of the 1920s prefigured the terms on which a more durable peace could be founded after 1945..
Price: $22.61 [Notify me when price goes down.]