Ethical motivations for green business and engineering

Corporate references to “sustainability” and the operative process of “green business” have become almost commonplace over the past decade. Companies not only seek to comply with environmental regulations, but many have discovered that techniques for reducing adverse environmental impact often have positive effects on corporate profitability as well. Such adoptions of green business and engineering practices are morally neutral because the driving forces behind them are legal and economic, but not ethical. In some instances, however, managers and engineers have undertaken green business initiatives with the notion of doing something positive for future humans and for the natural environment. In this paper we discuss the “green” driving forces behind moral decisions regarding the adoption of green engineering and business practices and conclude that most “green engineering” known to the public is simply good business practice. Only when engineering and business begin the “green engineering” program with the aim of reducing adverse impact on health or environment does “green engineering” become morally admirable.     

Preliminary investigations on the environmental effects on new heavyweight fabrics for use in civil engineering

As the use of advanced polymer composites (APC) in the civil engineering profession becomes more established, there is a need to identify potential problems associated with durability issues. The experimental durability study to be discussed in this paper, is part of a wider on going Brite-Euram Project to investigate the in-service characteristics of a hybrid Tee-beam constructed from concrete situated in the compressive part and, APC situated in the tensile part of the beam. The current investigation is concerned with the durability of the APC material when it is exposed to various environments. The APC part of the beam has been developed specifically for the construction industry and is manufactured from a composite of predominately unidirectional woven carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) and +/−45° stitched glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite; the matrix material is a low temperature cure epoxy resin suitable for civil engineering construction. The coupon samples were exposed to environments of three different temperatures (viz. 22, 45 and 60 °C), water, saturated road salt solution and ultra-violet (UV) radiation after which they were loaded to failure under a tensile stress. Results have shown that a reduction in mechanical properties (longitudinal strength and stiffness) of the three composite systems is most evident at higher temperatures and after exposure to water.     

Mixing Bayes and empirical Bayes inference to anticipate the realization of engineering concerns about variant system designs

Mixing Bayes and Empirical Bayes inference provides reliability estimates for variant system designs by using relevant failure data - observed and anticipated - about engineering changes arising due to modification and innovation. A coherent inference framework is proposed to predict the realization of engineering concerns during product development so that informed decisions can be made about the system design and the analysis conducted to prove reliability. The proposed method involves combining subjective prior distributions for the number of engineering concerns with empirical priors for the non-parametric distribution of time to realize these concerns in such a way that we can cross-tabulate classes of concerns to failure events within time partitions at an appropriate level of granularity. To support efficient implementation, a computationally convenient hypergeometric approximation is developed for the counting distributions appropriate to our underlying stochastic model. The accuracy of our approximation over first-order alternatives is examined, and demonstrated, through an evaluation experiment. An industrial application illustrates model implementation and shows how estimates can be updated using information arising during development test and analysis.     

Incorporating production concerns in conceptual product design

This paper presents a set of analytical tools that can be used to alter a product's design, manufacturing processes and assembly techniques to increase production rate. The analytical tools obtain these improvements by simultaneously considering each part's geometric attributes and complexity, vendor selection, material and process selection, and capacity planning at the conceptual stage of the product realization process. The method detects and then avoids heavily used resources by indicating which combination of one or more of its components' geometric attributes, manufacturing processes, material and assembly methods should be altered. The method is illustrated with the analysis of an overhead projector. It is shown that production rate can be doubled by either making small changes to a component's geometric attributes or by selecting different manufacturing processes. Neither of these changes affects the functionality of the product.     

Societal concerns and risk decisions

Societal concern is a relatively new term and refers to hazards with the capability to generate socio-political responses. Hazards invoking societal concerns pose a challenge to decision makers for they oftentimes have major policy implications yet frequently lack the analytic support affording them such elevated status. Regulators and corporate risk managers, therefore, have been confronted with the difficult question -how and to what extent should societal concerns be factored into risk management decisions? - a question which is compounded by the tendency of 'politicians' to want to accommodate these concerns. Here we first seek to explore the drivers of societal concerns prior to considering the implications for decision makers. We conclude that societal concerns stem from highly disparate causes, are not necessarily originated by the public as is often implied, and as such have markedly differing legitimacies. Furthermore, we note that attempts to incorporate societal concerns into risk decisions raise a host of methodological, political, and ethical issues which suggest, at the very least, that deep caution is required, especially where policy implications are high.     

Ethical issues in medico-legal exposures

The Medical Exposure Directive (MED) 97/43/Euratom defines medico-legal procedures as 'procedures performed for insurance or legal purposes without a medical indication'. The term 'medico-legal exposures' covers a wide range of possible types of exposures, very different in nature, for which the only feature in common is the fact that the main reason for performing them does not relate directly to the health of the individual being exposed to ionising radiation. The key issue in medico-legal exposures is justification. Balancing the advantages and disadvantages of such exposures is complex because not only can these be difficult to quantify and hence compare, but often the advantage may be to society whereas the disadvantage is usually to an individual. This adds an additional layer of ethical complexity to the problem and one, which requires input from a number of sources beyond the established radiation protection community. Because medico-legal exposures are considered to be medical exposures, they are not subject to dose limits. In medico-legal exposures where the benefit is not necessarily to the individual undergoing the exposure, the question must be asked as to whether or not this is an appropriate framework within which to conduct such exposures. This paper looks at the current situation in Europe, highlighting some of the particular problems that have arisen, and tries to identify the areas, which require further clarification and guidance.     

Numerical investigations in penetration mechanics

Computational techniques have been employed to investigate a variety of phenomena associated with the penetration process including cratering in thick targets and the perforation of thin targets. The dependency of these phenomena on impact velocity, material properties and projectile-target configurations are investigated for a variety of impact situations. Comparisons of the computational results with experimental data are made for those cases for which such data are available; agreement between theory and experiment is quite good.     

Bubble detector investigations in China

Investigation on bubble detectors started in China in 1989. Five types of bubble detectors have been developed, with LET thresholds ranging from 0.05 to 6.04 MeV mg(-1) cm(2) at 25 degrees C. The neutron response of bubble detectors made with freon-12 has been investigated with mono-energetic neutrons from 20 keV to 19 MeV. Its effective threshold energy for neutron detection is approximately 100 keV at 28 degrees C. The response above this threshold is approximately 1.5 x 10(-4) (bubble cm(-2))/(n cm(-2)). Bubble detectors are unique not only for neutron dosimetry but also for monitoring and identifying high-energy heavy ions such as cosmic radiation in the space. High-energy heavy ion tracks in large size bubble detectors have been investigated in cooperation with scientists in Japan. The key parameter behind the thresholds of bubble detectors for track registration is the critical rate of energy loss. Three approaches to identify high-energy heavy ions with bubble detectors are suggested.     

Scientometric investigations in the USSR

The following is a review of scientometric investigations in the USSR. Scientometrics has been taken in the rigorous sense of the term, defined as an approach of the science of science which attempts to measure sciencereproducibly. The state of scientometric research in the Soviet Union is compared to that of other countries.     

Radiographic inspection in failure investigations

This article is an introduction to one of the most commonly used and infrequently discussed techniques applied to failure investigations—industrial radiography. Radiographic testing or inspection (RT) is a rapid, nondestructive evaluation process that can provide critical information in the early stages of a failure analysis. Its application is not limited to metallurgical investigations, but also complements electrical, fire causes and origins, and general mechanical investigations.     

Demagnetizing fields in bubble-domain investigations

A theory of cylindrical domains is presented for cases of a single domain in a plate of finite extent and of many domains scattered at random in a plate of infinite extent in the plane. Force and stability functions are determined for both cases. New unexpected solutions showing stability without a bias field, as well as those, for which the bias field must be directed in compliance with the magnetization in the cylindrical domain, are obtained. It is proved that the neglect of finite plate dimensions, as well as of the interaction between domains, is the cause of the apparent dependence of energy density of the domain wall on the bias field as stated in other reports. Theoretical considerations are proved by the experiments on the domain structure carried out on YFeO3orthoferrite.     

Mining execution relations for crosscutting concerns

Aspect mining tries to identify crosscutting concerns in the code of existing systems and thus supports their adaption to an aspect-oriented design. A semi-automatic static aspect mining approach is described, where the program's control flow graphs are investigated for recurring execution patterns based on different constraints, such as the requirement that the patterns have to exist in different calling contexts. Two case studies done with the implemented tool show that many discovered candidates for crosscutting concerns are instances of delegation and should not be refactored into aspects. More generally, it is shown that aspect mining techniques need a way to distinguish between delegation and superimposed behaviour.