saturation

sat·u·ra·tion   (sāch'ə-rā'shən)    n.   The act or process of saturating. The condition of being saturated. The condition of being full to or beyond satisfaction; satiety. Physics A state of a ferromagnetic substance in which an increase in applied magnetic field strength does not produce an increase in magnetization. Chemistry The state of a compound or solution that is fully saturated. Meteorology A condition in which air at a specific temperature contains all the water vapor it can hold; 100 percent relative humidity. Vividness of hue; degree of difference from a gray of the same lightness or brightness. Also called intensity. See Table at color. Intensive shelling or bombing of a military target to achieve total destruction. The flooding of a market with all of a commodity that consumers can purchase.

Main Entry: sat·u·ra·tion
Pronunciation: "sach-&-'rA-sh&n
Function: noun
1 : the act of saturating : the stateof being saturated
2 : conversion of an unsaturated to a saturated chemical compound (as by hydrogenation)
3 : a state of maximum impregnation;especially : the presence in air of the most water possible under existent pressure and temperature
4 a : the one of the three psychological dimensions of colorperception that is related to the purity of the color and that decreases as the amount of white present in the stimulus increases saturation in a red hue is well understood ifwe remember pink is a fundamental red hue diluted or mixed with considerable white —Practical Color Television> called also intensity; —compare BRIGHTNESS, HUE b (1) : degree ofdifference from the gray having the same lightness —used of an object color (2) : degree of difference from the achromatic light-source color of the same brightness —used of alight-source color

saturation sat·u·ra·tion (sāch'ə-rā'shən)
n.
Abbr. sat.

1. The act or process of saturating.

2. The condition of being saturated.

3. The condition of being full to or beyond satisfaction; satiety.

4. Filling of all the available sites on an enzyme molecule by its substrate, or on a hemoglobin molecule by molecular oxygen or carbon monoxide.

5. In optics, the degree which colors of the same wavelength are differentiated from one another on the basis of purity which correlates with the amount of white present, such as red from pink.

saturation
1. In colour theory, the "colourfulness" of a stimulus relative to its brightness, the amount of the dominant wavelength relative to other wavelengths in the colour, one of the three coordinates in the hue, saturation, value (HSV) and hue, saturation, brightness (HSB) colour models.
White, black and grey contain equal amounts of red, green and blue light and are completely unsaturated. A pure colour with very little gray in it is highly saturated. The amount of saturation does not affect the hue of a colour and is unrelated to the value (total amount of light in a colour).
There are several competing mathematical definitions of saturation.
(http://www.ncsu.edu/scivis/lessons/colormodels/color_models2.html#saturation).
(http://www.pomona.edu/academics/courserelated/classprojects/visual-lit/saturation/saturation.html).
2. The state of any system that is operating at its maximum capacity, e.g. a network connection that is carry a continuous stream of data with no idle time. Capacity planning aims to monitor load and increase resources before saturation is reached.
(2008-05-09)