Recent years have seen a tremendous progress in the microscopic theoretical treatment of surfaces and processes on surfaces. While some decades ago a phenomenological thermodynamic approach was dominant, a variety of surface properties can now be described from first principles, i.e. without invoking any empirical parameters. Consequently, the field of theoretical surface science is no longer l...

Thermoeconomic models, which combine the concept of cost in the field of economics and the concept of exergy in the field of thermodynamics, provide a possibility of optimizing complex energy-generating systems to achieve a best balance between thermodynamic efficiency and economic cost (including investment cost and operation cost). For the first time, operation optimization on a 300 MW coal-f...

The search for reliable and efficient global optimization algorithms for solving phase stability and phase equilibrium problems in applied thermodynamics is an ongoing area of research. In this study, we evaluated and compared the reliability and efficiency of eight selected nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms for solving difficult phase stability and phase equilibrium problems. These algo...