Preface

This book introduces up-to-date information on the thermophysical properties (TPs) of complex materials. The TPs of complex materials is an interesting topic and a new frontier in applied science and technology that has applications in both basic and applied research. Recently, TPs have shown that modern advances in material development, experiments, and theoretical tools can embrace conventional refrigeration and power generation technologies. Device performance is a major task for TP control design and how material parameters can control devices. Different attempts have been made to increase the performance of devices with TPs and new improved methods are required for material structure efficiency from material parameters optimization. Considerable advances in this area have been made over the last few decades using a diverse set of theoretical, experimental, and computational techniques. This covers a wide spectrum of research areas in TPs, and is mainly based on the dusty plasmas and nanoscale materials in global universities.

The preferred research topics show a large range of well-matched syllabi that are presently being studied in different countries. The book consists of three sections with seven chapters and each section begins with fundamental ideas involving the TPs of materials, properties at the nanolevel, and complex plasmas, followed by a number of research issues and their clarifications. Developments in TPs are motivated by improvements in multidisciplinary areas of science and technology, including physics, chemistry, applied biology, engineering, and applied disciplines associated with routine applications (for instance, plasma oncology, semiconductor and chemical industries, etc.). This book is basically designed for postgraduate students of complex materials who need to formulate the establishment of information in this area. It is also a resource for interested readers from allied fields, for instance, materials science, plasma medicine, industrial technologies, energy production, and heating/cooling strategies. The first chapter provides a discussion on the structural behaviors of the transport properties of metallic alloys. The second chapter explains the modeling of viscosity and theory of entropy for hydrocarbons for a wide range of temperatures and pressures. The third chapter incorporates thermodynamics outcomes by using silver ionic conduction in solid-state electrolytes. In the fourth chapter, the authors elaborate on TPs at the nano-level. The fifth chapter provides experimental investigations into the dynamic viscosity of grapheme and ferrous oxide-based nanofluids. In the sixth chapter, the authors tackle the thermal conductivity of complex dusty plasmas through molecular dynamics simulations. The final seventh chapter presents wave instabilities in Hall plasma devices.

> Dr. Aamir Shahzad Tenured Associate Professor, Molecular Modeling and Simulation Laboratory, Department of Physics, Government College University, Faisalabad, Pakistan

Key Laboratory of Thermo-Fluid Science and Engineering, Ministry of Education (MOE), Xi'an Jiaotong University, People's Republic of China Section 1
