Cooperative advertising in a capacitated manufacturer–retailer supply chain: a game‐theoretic approach

To achieve a more realistic understanding of how the supply chain's components interact, it is helpful to consider the operational limitations of the underlying supply chain while analyzing cooperative advertising. This paper studies cooperative advertising in a manufacturer–retailer supply chain under the practical operational assumption that the manufacturer's production capacity is limited. The retailer advertises locally, and the manufacturer advertises in national media and supports part of the retailer's promotional costs. Equilibria are determined under two different scenarios. In the first scenario, both retailer and manufacturer move simultaneously, while in the second scenario, they move sequentially, with the manufacturer being the leader. The sales function is a bivariate version of the diminishing returns response function. When the production capacity is unlimited, several important properties can be proven, which cannot be shown analytically for the existing sales functions. Considering the production‐capacity constraint leads to new managerial insights into cooperative advertising. For example, only if the production capacity is large enough, both manufacturer and retailer are better off under the second scenario than the first scenario. In other words, the sequential move is not necessarily Pareto‐improving when the production capacity is limited. It is also observed that, under the first scenario, there are multiple equilibria whenever the production capacity is not too high. Under the second scenario, the manufacturer supports the retailer only when the retailer's margin is relatively small compared to the manufacturer's margin and production capacity.     

A System for Synchronized Pulsed Perfusion of the Coronary Arteries During Cardiopulmonary Bypass

A system for providing near-physiologic flow patterns in the coronary arteries during cardiac surgery is described. Results in 40 dogs demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.     

Oily compounds removal in wastewater treatment system of pars oil refinery to improve its efficiency in a lab scale pilot

The aim of this research is inspecting the efficiency of physical-chemical and biological processes with the active sludge method in the wastewater of the Pars Oil Refinery Company. This research was done from 26th, January 2007 and continued up to 27th, May 2007. The main operation in Pars oil refinery is to produce lubricants. This research tries to examine and evaluate the performance of treatment system at the refinery to decrease microorganism in the industrial wastewater in a laboratory scale pilot. The pilot has two sections; physical-chemical section, including Dissolved Air Flotation system, and biological section, including active sludge reactor and clarifier. This investigation carried on a 10 liter Dissolved Air Flotation reactor and an active sludge reactor in a laboratory scale. The volume of the aerireactor (aeration reactor) was 10 liters, and the volume of the secondary sediment was 3.5 liters. The waste water of the refinery was used as inlet flow of the pilot and necessary sludge was obtained at first from the Shahrak Ekbatan waste water treatment system. After analyzing the test results, it was concluded that the average percentage of excluding oil, Chemical Oxygen Demand and Biological Oxygen Demand was 29.7, 49 and 27.8 respectively. This indicates the effective role of physical treatment in decreasing oily emulsion material that would result in decreasing organic density in untreated wastewater. In biological system, the efficiency of excluding Chemical Oxygen Demand and Biological Oxygen Demand is 73.4 and 84.7, respectively. This confirms high efficiency of this unit. The samples taken from entering (influent) and exiting (effluent) wastewater of both units were tested. Standard Methods were applied to determine the considered physical and chemical parameters.     

Performance evaluation of a continuous flow Photo-Impinging Streams Cyclone Reactor for phenol degradation

In this study, an impinging streams cyclone reactor has been utilized as a novel apparatus in photocatalytic degradation of phenol. Degussa P25 TiO₂ nano particles have been applied as the photocatalyst under UV radiation. The operating parameters including catalyst loading, pH, initial phenol concentration and light Intensity have been found to affect the efficiency of the photocatalytic degradation process within this photoreactor. Photocatalytic degradation of phenol has been also investigated in a continuous flow impinging streams system. The results have shown a higher efficiency and an increased performance capability of the present reactor in comparison with the conventional processes.     

Polyvinyl siloxane template aids in recontouring natural teeth opposing single dentures

This article describes a procedure that provides proper reduction of natural teeth opposing complete dentures. By use of a polyvinyl siloxane prosthetic template, natural dentition can be reduced to a more favorable plane, which will facilitate denture construction. This procedure will eliminate the risk of arbitrary grinding and will minimize guesswork through guided intraoral reduction.     

Adiabatic nanofocusing scattering-type optical nanoscopy of individual gold nanoparticles

We explore imaging of local electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of metallic nanoparticles using a grating-coupled scattering-type near-field scanning optical microscope. In this microscope, propagating surface plasmon polariton wavepackets are launched onto smooth gold tapers where they are adiabatically focused toward the nanometer-sized taper apex. We report two-dimensional raster-scanned optical images showing pronounced near-field contrast and demonstrating sub-30 nm resolution imaging of localized surface plasmon polariton fields of spherical and elliptical nanoparticles. By comparison to three-dimensional finite-difference time domain simulations, we conclude that virtually background-free near-field imaging is achieved. The microscope combines deep subwavelength resolution, high local field intensities and a straightforward imaging contrast, making it interesting for a variety of applications in linear and nonlinear nanospectroscopy.     

Effect of (Co–TeO2-doped polyvinylpyrrolidone) organic interlayer on the electrophysical characteristics of Al/p-Si (MS) structures

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - In this paper, (Co–TeO2) nanostructures were synthesized using the microwave-assisted method for the fabrication of...     

Structural Engineering of Hierarchical Aerogels Comprised of Multi-dimensional Gradient Carbon Nanoarchitectures for Highly Efficient Microwave Absorption

Recently,multilevel structural carbon aerogels are deemed as attractive candidates for microwave absorbing materials.Nevertheless,excessive stack and agglomerat...