ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins by highlighting the ubiquity of coagulation and fragmentation processes in nature and technology. It discusses the formulation of fragmentation equations that enables them to be cast in the form of an abstract Cauchy problem in a suitable Banach space, so that they can then be analysed by semigroup theory. The book examines the existence of global solutions to the C-F equation with an unbounded coagulation kernel with arbitrary growth rate provided it is bounded by the fragmentation part. It shows that providing the characterisation of the generator settles the question of the uniqueness of the solutions to the Cauchy problem at hand.
