Preface

The field of modern electric drives is very multidisciplinary and progress achieved in power electronics, electric machines, computer engineering, control sciences, informatics, or ad‐ vanced materials have a significant impact on the overall improvements of the drives. As the electricity needed to power electric drives is, to an increasing extent, generated from re‐ newable energy resources, the substitution of electric drives for internal combustion engines running mainly on fossil fuels, contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Excellent controllability of advanced variable-speed drives also enables achieving better properties of devices in which they are implemented.

Most of this book focuses on applications of electric drives in hybrid and electric vehicles, as one would expect. The problems of modeling, control, fault diagnostics, and battery man‐ agement are particularly addressed. Applications in aircraft, non-road mobile machinery or in heating, ventilation and air-condition systems are also discussed. Apart from the descrip‐ tion of the current state of the art in the respective fields, some new findings and methods are presented. The reader will find extensive bibliography mapping recent developments in the addressed areas, too.

I would like to thank all the participating authors for their valuable contributions and the InTech staff, particularly Ms. Sandra Bakic, the publishing process manager, for their profes‐ sional approach to publishing this book.

> **Miroslav Chomat** Institute of Thermomechanics CAS, v.v.i. Prague, Czech Republic
