Engineering the Virtual Enterprise: An Architecture-Driven Modeling Approach

The managerial and organization practices required by an increasingly dynamic competitive manufacturing, business, and industrial environment include the formation of virtual enterprises. A major concern in the management of virtual enterprises is the integration and coordination of business processes contributed by partner enterprises. The traditional methods of process modeling currently used for the design of business processes do not fully support the needs of the virtual enterprise. The design of these virtual enterprises imposes requirements that make it more complex than conventional intraorganizational business process design. This paper first describes an architecture that assists in the design of the virtual enterprise. Then it discusses business process reengineering (BPR) as a methodology for modeling and designing virtual organizations. While BPR presents many useful tools, the approach itself and the modeling tools commonly used for redesign have fundamental shortcomings when dealing with the virtual enterprise. However, several innovative modeling approaches provide promise for this problem. The paper discusses some of these innovative modeling approaches, such as object-oriented modeling of business processes, agent modeling of organizational players, and the use of ontological modeling to capture and manipulate knowledge about the players and processes. The paper concludes with a conceptual modeling methodology that combines these approaches under the enterprise architecture for the design of virtual enterprises.     

Influence of Rolling Element Bearing Modeling on the Predicted Thermal Behavior of the FZG Test Rig

A thermomechanical model of the FZG test rig is presented. The numerical model is based on the thermal network method and takes into account power losses due to tooth friction, rolling element bearings (REBs), oil churning, and shaft seals. Some measurements underline that REB rings run at different temperatures. To investigate this difference, several REB models are proposed and compared to measurements. Their influence on the global thermal behavior of the gear unit is discussed and analyzed.     

Analytical electron tomography mapping of the SiC pore oxidation at the nanoscale

Silicon carbide is a ceramic material that has been widely studied because of its potential applications, ranging from electronics to heterogeneous catalysis. Recently, a new type of SiC materials with a medium specific surface area and thermal conductivity, called β-SiC, has attracted overgrowing interest as a new class of catalyst support in several catalytic reactions. A primary electron tomography study, performed in usual mode, has revealed a dual surface structure defined by two types of porosities made of networks of connected channels with sizes larger than 50 nm and ink-bottled pores with sizes spanning from 4 to 50 nm. Depending on the solvent nature, metal nanoparticles could be selectively deposited inside one of the two porosities, a fact that illustrates a selective wetting titration of the two types of surfaces by different liquids. The explaining hypothesis that has been put forward was that this selectivity against solvents is related to the pore surface oxidation degree of the two types of pores. A new technique of analytical electron tomography, where the series of projections used to reconstruct the volume of an object is recorded in energy filtered mode (EFTEM), has been implemented to map the pore oxidation state and to correlate it with the morphology and the accessibility of the porous network. Applied, for the first time, at a nanoscale resolution, this technique allowed us to obtain 3D elemental maps of different elements present in the analysed porous grains, in particular oxygen; we found thus that the interconnected channel pores are more rapidly oxidized than the ink-bottled ones. Alternatively, our study highlights the great interest of this method that opens the way for obtaining precise information on the chemical composition of a 3D surface at a nanometer scale.     

The transfer of metallic contamination via contact between solid objects

The transfer of metallic contamination via solid contact is an almost non documented topic in the literature when compared to the spread through liquids which is has been intensively investigated for cleaning studies.This paper presents the transfer mechanisms of metallic aggregates from substrate to substrate though contact with tools used during wafer processing. In addition we propose models which agree with the experimental observations. The influence of several parameters on the transfer coefficients has been investigated, including the type of contamination (deposited films, particles…), the size or shape of the particle, the composition of the particle (metallic or dielectric), the substrate and the roughness and flatness of the plates used to hold the wafers during processing as well as the substrate surface composition (bare Si, oxidized…).The transfer of metals via the contact between solid objects only occurs from particular mechanisms. Not considering electrical forces, the first order parameter on the transfer is the particle size. Global transfer by contact occurs mainly in the 0.5-5 μm range and can be as high as 10%. For the second order, the parameters mentioned previously can affect the transfer of the particles, for example, an increase of the particle roughness induces an increase of the separation distance between particle and substrate which consequently decreases the Van der Waals interactions.     

Can water level stations be used for thermal assessment in aquatic ecosystem?

Many studies focus on stream water temperature (WT) because it is considered a key ecological factor. However, few of them have investigated the use of WT data from water level monitoring networks, which often measure WT as ancillary data. Our study was conducted in southern Belgium at a high temporal resolution with continuous data recorded at intervals of 10 min between 2012 and 2016 and large spatial scale greater than 16,000 km². This study aimed to assess whether a regional water level network (140 stations) is reliable for continuous WT monitoring based on a Bland–Altman analysis with WT collected through a European monitoring network (Water Framework Directive). This study also investigates whether WT data acquired by water level stations can be used to perform both state‐of‐the‐art visualization of thermal regimes and spatio‐temporal queries for specific ecological monitoring. We found that the water level stations were reliable tools in recording continuous WT in the streams of the study area. The temperature difference between the two WT monitoring networks was ?0.57°C on average. Our positive results promote the use of WT from water level stations in order to globally characterize the thermal regime of streams as well as to provide spatial or temporal information on this regime at high frequencies. As an example, our data showed the effectiveness for brown trout (Salmo trutta fario L.) in spatializing thermal risk areas related to the thermal requirement of this fish species; in 2015, 19% of stations located in brown trout fish zone recorded temperatures above 25°C.     

Batch distillation of spirits: experimental study and simulation of the behaviour of volatile aroma compounds

This paper focuses on the behaviour of volatile compounds during batch distillation of wine or low wine, in traditional Charentais copper stills, heated with a direct open flame at laboratory (600 L) and industrial (2500 L) scale. Sixty‐nine volatile compounds plus ethanol were analysed during the low wine distillation in the 600 L alembic still. Forty‐four were quantified and classified according to their concentration profile in the distillate over time and compared with previous studies. Based on the online recording of volume flow, density and temperature of the distillate with a Coriolis flowmeter, distillation was simulated with ProSim® BatchColumn software. Twenty‐six volatile compounds were taken into account, using the coefficients of the ‘Non‐Random Two Liquids’ model. The concentration profiles of 18 compounds were accurately represented, with slight differences in the maximum concentration for seven species together with a single compound that was poorly represented. The distribution of the volatile compounds in the four distillate fractions (heads, heart, seconds and tails) was well estimated by simulation. Finally, data from wine and low wine distillations in the large‐scale alembic still (2500 L) were correctly simulated, suggesting that it was possible to adjust the simulation parameters with the Coriolis flowmeter recording and represent the concentration profiles of most of the quantifiable volatile compounds. © 2019 The Institute of Brewing & Distilling     

Speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography images using digital filtering

Speckle noise is a ubiquitous artifact that limits the interpretation of optical coherence tomography images. Here we apply various speckle-reduction digital filters to optical coherence tomography images and compare their performance. Our results indicate that shift-invariant, nonorthogonal wavelet-transform-based filters together with enhanced Lee and adaptive Wiener filters can significantly reduce speckle and increase the signal-to-noise ratio, while preserving strong edges. The speckle reduction capabilities of these filters are also compared with speckle reduction from incoherent angular compounding. Our results suggest that by using these digital filters, the number of individual angles required to attain a certain level of speckle reduction can be decreased.     

From elastic homogenization to upscaling of non-Newtonian fluid flows in porous media

Upscaling behaviors of heterogeneous microstructures to define macroscopic effective media is of major interest in many areas of computational mechanics, in particular those related to materials and processes engineering. In this paper, we explore the possibility of defining a macroscopic behavior manifold from microscopic calculations, and then use it directly for efficiently performing manifold-based simulations at the macroscopic scale. We consider in this work upscaling of non-Newtonian flows in porous media, and more particularly the ones involving short-fibre suspensions.