Investigation of the Strength Loss of HMWPE Yarns During Manufacturing Process of 3D Warp Interlock Fabrics

Applied Composite Materials - This research paper presented recent advancements on the manufacturing technique of the 3D warp interlock fabrics (3DWIFs) as fibrous material. Four different types of...     

Risk Governance of Emerging Technologies Demonstrated in Terms of its Applicability to Nanomaterials

Nanotechnologies have reached maturity and market penetration that require nano‐specific changes in legislation and harmonization among legislation domains, such as the amendments to REACH for nanomaterials (NMs) which came into force in 2020. Thus, an assessment of the components and regulatory boundaries of NMs risk governance is timely, alongside related methods and tools, as part of the global efforts to optimise nanosafety and integrate it into product design processes, via Safe(r)‐by‐Design (SbD) concepts. This paper provides an overview of the state‐of‐the‐art regarding risk governance of NMs and lays out the theoretical basis for the development and implementation of an effective, trustworthy and transparent risk governance framework for NMs. The proposed framework enables continuous integration of the evolving state of the science, leverages best practice from contiguous disciplines and facilitates responsive re‐thinking of nanosafety governance to meet future needs. To achieve and operationalise such framework, a science‐based Risk Governance Council (RGC) for NMs is being developed. The framework will provide a toolkit for independent NMs' risk governance and integrates needs and views of stakeholders. An extension of this framework to relevant advanced materials and emerging technologies is also envisaged, in view of future foundations of risk research in Europe and globally.     

Towards a generalized physicochemical framework

Process models used for activated sludge, anaerobic digestion and in general wastewater treatment plant process design and optimization have traditionally focused on important biokinetic conversions. There is a growing realization that abiotic processes occurring in the wastewater (i.e. 'solvent') have a fundamental effect on plant performance. These processes include weak acid-base reactions (ionization), spontaneous or chemical dose-induced precipitate formation and chemical redox conversions, which influence pH, gas transfer, and directly or indirectly the biokinetic processes themselves. There is a large amount of fundamental information available (from chemical and other disciplines), which, due to its complexity and its diverse sources (originating from many different water and process environments), cannot be readily used in wastewater process design as yet. This position paper outlines the need, the methods, available knowledge and the fundamental approaches that would help to focus the effort of research groups to develop a physicochemical framework specifically in support of whole-plant process modeling. The findings are that, in general, existing models such as produced by the International Water Association for biological processes are limited by omission of key corrections such as non-ideal acid-base behavior, as well as major processes (e.g., ion precipitation). While the underlying chemistry is well understood, its applicability to wastewater applications is less well known. This justifies important further research, with both experimental and model development activities to clarify an approach to modeling of physicochemical processes.     

TRINI: an adaptive load balancing strategy based on garbage collection for clustered Java systems

Nowadays, clustered environments are commonly used in high‐performance computing and enterprise‐level applications to achieve faster response time and higher throughput than single machine environments. Nevertheless, how to effectively manage the workloads in these clusters has become a new challenge. As a load balancer is typically used to distribute the workload among the cluster's nodes, multiple research efforts have concentrated on enhancing the capabilities of load balancers. Our previous work presented a novel adaptive load balancing strategy (TRINI) that improves the performance of a clustered Java system by avoiding the performance impacts of major garbage collection, which is an important cause of performance degradation in Java. The aim of this paper is to strengthen the validation of TRINI by extending its experimental evaluation in terms of generality, scalability and reliability. Our results have shown that TRINI can achieve significant performance improvements, as well as a consistent behaviour, when it is applied to a set of commonly used load balancing algorithms, demonstrating its generality. TRINI also proved to be scalable across different cluster sizes, as its performance improvements did not noticeably degrade when increasing the cluster size. Finally, TRINI exhibited reliable behaviour over extended time periods, introducing only a small overhead to the cluster in such conditions. These results offer practitioners a valuable reference regarding the benefits that a load balancing strategy, based on garbage collection, can bring to a clustered Java system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Teachers’ personal web use at work

This article presents findings from an online survey of teachers concerning personal web use (PWU) at work. Often considered as ‘cyberslacking’ or ‘Internet abuse’, PWU is a growing phenomenon within increasingly Internet-dependent workplaces. The findings of this study highlight a wide range of types of personal web usage amongst teachers ranging from sending personal emails to social networking and personal banking as well as a range of reasons for PWU from a means of addressing permeable work-life boundaries and coping with work intensification to providing a virtual space for routine resistance. The data also suggest that, rather than being detrimental to the organisation, PWU could potentially be a means of increasing worker productivity and developing the digital literacy of teachers. It concludes by considering the implications of the findings for senior managers within organisations.     

A novel approach for determining fatigue resistances of different muscle groups in static cases

In ergonomics and biomechanics, muscle fatigue models based on maximum endurance time (MET) models are often used to integrate fatigue effect into ergonomic and biomechanical application. However, due to the empirical principle of those MET models, the disadvantages of this method are: 1) the MET models cannot reveal the muscle physiology background very well; 2) there is no general formation for those MET models to predict MET. In this paper, a theoretical MET model is extended from a simple muscle fatigue model with consideration of the external load and maximum voluntary contraction in passive static exertion cases. The universal availability of the extended MET model is analyzed in comparison to 24 existing empirical MET models. Using mathematical regression method, 21 of the 24 MET models have intraclass correlations over 0.9, which means the extended MET model could replace the existing MET models in a general and computationally efficient way. In addition, an important parameter, fatigability (or fatigue resistance) of different muscle groups, could be calculated via the mathematical regression approach. Its mean value and its standard deviation are useful for predicting MET values of a given population during static operations. The possible reasons influencing the fatigue resistance were classified and discussed, and it is still a very challenging work to find out the quantitative relationship between the fatigue resistance and the influencing factors.

Relevance to industry

MSD risks can be reduced by correct evaluation of static muscular work. Different muscle groups have different properties, and a generalized MET model is useful to simplify the fatigue analysis and fatigue modeling, especially for digital human techniques and virtual human simulation tools.     

Local Volume Preservation for Skinned Characters

Generating plausible deformations of a character skin within the standard production pipeline is a challenge. This paper presents a volume preservation method dedicated to skinned characters. As usual, the character is defined by a skin mesh at some rest pose and an animation skeleton. At each animation step, skin deformations are first computed using standard SSD. Our method corrects the result using a set of local deformations which model the fold‐over‐free, constant volume behavior of soft tissues. This is done geometrically, without the need of any physically‐based simulation. To make the method easily applicable, we also provide automatic ways to extract the local regions where volume is to be preserved and to compute adequate skinning weights, both based on the character's morphology.     

Smart cards and remote computing: Interaction or convergence?

Computing power is largely becoming a basic supply which you can envisage to buy from a provider like you buy power or water. This is the result of a now long running trend that consists in connecting computing resources together so as to set up what can globally be referred to as a remote computing platform, the most up-to-date incarnation of which is the notion of a grid (Foster and Kesselman, 2003). These resources can then be shared among users, what means circulating codes and the results of their execution over a network, what is highly insecure. At the other end of the spectrum of computing devices, smart cards ([Mayes and Markantonakis, 2008] and [Hendry, 2001]) offer extremely secure but extremely limited computing capabilities. The question is thus to bridge the gap between computational power and high security. The aim of this paper is to show how large and high capacity remote computing architectures can interact with smart cards, which certainly are the most widely deployed, still the smallest computing systems of the information technology era, so as to improve the overall security of a global infrastructure.     

Distributed manufacturing control with extended CNP interaction of intelligent products

This paper describes two heterarchical architectures which use distributed intelligence for the control (operation scheduling, resource allocation and product routing) of a manufacturing cell. In these architectures intelligence is put respectively at the product and through the network of workstation computers. The cost of embedded specialized hardware required for the first option is still very high. The second option needs the utilization of Automatic Identification and Data Capture technology close to the product to permit its identification and tracking by the computer system. These technologies enable the automated identification of objects, the collection of data about them, and the storage of that data directly into computer systems. Through this network, the computer system can access or update information in databases about the products and connect with software agents that represent production orders and resources and take in common decisions through negotiation and contract-based rules. The theory of the proposed solutions is based on the holonic manufacturing and product-driven automation concepts. The implementation methodology along with experimental results is presented, emphasizing the advantages of each solution.     

Cold acclimation or grapeseed oil feeding affects phospholipid composition and mitochondrial function in duckling skeletal muscle

The phospholipid fatty acid (FA) composition and functional properties of skeletal muscle and liver mitochondria were examined in cold-acclimated (CA, 4°C) ducklings. Phospholipid FA of isolated muscle mitochondria from CA birds were longer and more unsaturated than those from thermoneutral (TN, 25°C) reared ducklings. The rise in long-chain and polyunsaturated FA (PUFA, mainly 20∶4n-6) was associated with a higher State 4 respiration rate and a lower respiratory control ratio (RCR). Hepatic mitochondria, by contrast, were much less affected by cold acclimation. The cold-induced changes in phospholipid FA profile and functional properties of muscle mitochondria were reproduced by giving TN ducklings a diet enriched in grapeseed oil (GO, rich in n-6 FA), suggesting a causal relationship between the membrane structure and mitochondrial functional parameters. However, hepatic mitochondria from ducklings fed the GO diet also showed an enrichment in long-chain PUFA but opposite changes in their biochemical characteristics (lower State 4, higher RCR). It is suggested that the differential modulation of mitochondrial functional properties by membrane lipid composition between skeletal muscle and liver may depend on muscle-specific factors possibly interacting with long-chain PUFA and affecting the proton leakiness of mitochondrial membranes.