Fractals in Engineering New Trends in Theory and Applications

The application of fractals in the engineering sciences is evolving swiftly and the editors have turned to Springer for the third time to bring you the latest research emerging from the rapid growth in techniques available for the employment of the ideas of fractals and complexity to a variety of disciplines in and associated with the engineering field. The strong potential of this research can be seen in real industrial situations with recent progress being made in areas such as chemical engineering, internet traffic, physics and finance. Image processing continues to be a major field of application for fractal analysis and is well-represented here.

It is important to note that the applications models are presented with a firm basis in theoretical argument, the qualitative observation of fractal phenomena no longer being sufficient.

Consisting of papers written by a world-wide pool of experts, the multidisciplinary approach of this third volume will be of particular interest to industrial researchers and practitioners as well as to academics from many backgrounds.

Fractals in Engineering: New Trends in Theory and Applications continues the publication of engineering-related research in fractal techniques begun in Fractals in Engineering and Fractals: Theory and Applications in Engineering (Springer London 1997 and 1999).

Part 1: Mathematical Aspects.- Theory and Applications of Fractal Tops.- Splines, Fractal Functions, and Besov and Triebel-Lizorkin Spaces.- Hoelderian Random Functions.- Fractal Stationary Density in Coupled Maps.- Part 2: Physics.- A Network of Fractal Force Chains and Their Effect in Granular Materials under Compression.- Percolation and Permeability of Three Dimensional Fracture Networks with a Power Law Size Distribution.- Acoustic Diffraction Patterns from Fractal to Urban Structures: Applications to the Sierpinski Triangle and to a Neoclassical Urban Facade.- Turbulent k - epsilon model of flute-like musical instrument sound production.- Part 3: Chemical Engineering.- A Simple Discrete Stochastic Model for Laser-induced Jet-chemical Etching.- Invariant Structures and Multifractal Measures in 2d Mixing Systems.- Part 4: Finance.- Long Range Dependence in Financial Markets.- Financial Modelling by Multiscale Fractional Brownian Motion.- Part 5: Internet Traffic.- Limiting Fractal Random Processes in Heavy-tailed Systems.- A Non-parametric Test for Self-similarity and Stationarity in Network Traffic.- Part 6: Image Processing.- Continuous Evolution of Functions and Measures Toward Fixed Points of Contraction Mappings.- Various Mathematical Approaches to Extract Information from Textures of Increasing Complexities.- Fractal Inverse Problem: Approximation, Formulation and Differential Methods.