Page 15 - Fluid Power Engineering

Preface

have been interested in writing short technical articles from my
graduate school days. I was never good at it. In those days, I
I supposedlywrotedensestuff,andtheaudienceIhadinmindwere
experts in the field. This changed as I wrote for a corporate audience.
When I got into the wind business, I wrote white papers and blogs
regularly but never considered writing a book. The idea of writing this
book came to me from a dear friend Satya Komatineni, author of books
on Android. He encouraged me to send a proposal to McGraw-Hill
about the book. This led me down to a nine-month long adventure.
The best metaphor to describe the adventure is that writing a book is
akin to the nine-month process of gestation and birthing of the first
child. Although I have not personally experienced it, I have lived with
someone who has. It is exciting, uncomfortable, painful, at times really
painful, and in the end, the product makes you forget the pain.
The impetus for writing this book was the lack of books on the
market that targeted engineers. Specifically, I wanted to write a book
that would give an engineer, from any discipline, sufficient knowledge
about the multidisciplinary field of wind energy. This book intends
to bring to bear at least five disciplines in order to provide a reason-
ably comprehensive understanding of the field of wind energy. The
five disciplines are meteorology, mechanical and aeronautical engi-
neering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and environmental
engineering. In addition, to these core engineering disciplines, the
book has chapters on finance and project management, two business-
related disciplines that are key to wind energy.
I wrote the book with the following audiences in mind. First are
engineers and scientists in the wind industry but who practice in a
narrow segment of the industry that covers their specific discipline.
Second are engineers and scientists who want to enter the wind in-
dustry. Third are undergraduate engineering students and technical
college students who want to learn about the various disciplines in

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