Enabling customers engagement and collaboration for small and medium-sized enterprises in ubiquitous multi-channel ecosystems

Over the last few years, we have encountered an exponential growth in online communication opportunities. Organizations have more and more ways to connect and engage with their current or future customers. The existence of more opportunities in connecting to people can be both an enabler and a burden. Being present at a multitude of different channels requires the effective management of a very large number of adapted contents, formats, and interaction patterns fulfilling the communication and cooperation needs of distributed target groups. In this respect, we integrate existing fragmented communication and monitoring approaches into a full-fledged communication model as a basis for an adequate engagement approach. We describe applications of our approach in both the eTourism and manufacturing domain. In this paper, we introduce an approach that will enable communication, collaboration and value exchange of users through a multitude of online interaction possibilities based on the use of semantic technology. Finally, we also compare our approach with existing solutions with respect to the identified challenges in this subject.     

Wood‐fiber/high‐density‐polyethylene composites: Coupling agent performance

The coupling efficiency of seven coupling agents in wood–polymer composites (WPC) was investigated in this study. The improvement on the interfacial bonding strength, flexural modulus, and other mechanical properties of the resultant wood fiber/high‐density polyethylene (HDPE) composites was mainly related to the coupling agent type, function groups, molecular weight, concentration, and chain structure. As a coupling agent, maleated polyethylene (MAPE) had a better performance in WPC than oxidized polyethylene (OPE) and pure polyethylene (PPE) because of its stronger interfacial bonding. A combination of the acid number, molecular weight, and concentration of coupling agents had a significant effect on the interfacial bonding in WPC. The coupling agents with a high molecular weight, moderate acid number, and low concentration level were preferred to improve interfacial adhesion in WPC. The backbone structure of coupling agents also affected the interfacial bonding strength. Compared with the untreated composites, modified composites improved the interfacial bonding strength by 140% on maximum and the flexural storage modulus by 29%. According to the statistical analysis, 226D and 100D were the best of the seven coupling agents. The coupling agent performance was illustrated with the brush, switch, and amorphous structures. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 96: 93–102, 2005     

Conformational transitions in poly(butyl methacrylate)

Summary Temperature dependence of viscosity data was investigated on poly(butyl methacrylate) fractions in dilute solution. A discontinuity in intrinsic viscosity was observed in the 25°C–35°C temperature range. Sharp changes of unperturbed dimensions were visualized from this behaviour. The phenomenon can be accounted for by assuming conformational changes of the chain in different solvents.     

Twin-image suppression in digital in-line holography based on wave-front filtering

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Digital holography is an imaging process able to recreate three-dimensional representations of objects from recording pattern interference among distinct waves....     

Gripper Design for Radio Base Station Autonomous Maintenance System

For an autonomous system to perform maintenance tasks in a networking device or a radio base station (RBS), it has to deal with a series of technological challenges ranging from identifying hardware-related problems to manipulating connectors. This paper describes the development of a robot maintenance system dedicated to detect and resolve faulty links caused by unplugged or poorly connected cables. Although the maintenance system relies on four subsystems, we significantly focus on our low-cost and efficient custom gripper solution developed to handle RJ45 Ethernet connectors. To examine our gripper, we conducted three experiments. First, a qualitative questionnaire was submitted to 30 users in the case of the teleoperated scenario of the gripper attached to a robotic arm. Similarly, we also tested the automatic operation mode. The results showed that our system is reliable and delivers a highly efficient maintenance tool in both teleoperated and autonomous operation modes. The practical experiment containing the removal or unplugging of connectors demonstrated our gripper’s ability to adequately handle these, whereas the feedback from the questionnaire pointed to a positive user experience. The automatic test assessed the gripper’s robustness against the continuous operation.

     

Upcycling by grafting onto semi-crystalline polymers using supercritical CO2

The creation of graft copolymers by selectively grafting a second polymer to the amorphous fraction of a semi-crystalline polymer in supercritical CO₂ is demonstrated herein. The graft copolymer is synthesized by free radical polymerization of a vinyl monomer within the semi-crystalline polymer below its melt temperature. Such conditions afford selective grafting on the amorphous regions (block “B”) while leaving the crystalline domains (block “A”) unmodified. Accordingly, unique A-B, A-B-A, A-B-A-B-A, and so forth. block structures are formed. In this work, styrene is polymerized within polyamide 6, polyethylene terephthalate, and isotactic polypropylene. Purification of these material is performed to remove the un-grafted homopolymer, allowing for determination of the graft yield, the portion of polymer which covalently bonds to the semi-crystalline matrix. Grafting yields achieved in polyamide 6, polyethylene terephthalate, and isotactic polypropylene were 98%, 59%, and 15%, respectively. Property enhancements were observed upon further characterization of polystyrene-polyamide 6 copolymers, including high glass transition temperatures, the ability to be remelted, and tunable grafting molecular weight. Additionally, hydrophobicity is controlled by varying polystyrene composition. The remarkable range of accessed properties demonstrates this as a potential route to upcycling plastics.     

High temperature oxidation mechanism of dilute copper aluminium alloys

Dilute copper-aluminium alloys were oxidized in air from 700 to 1000 °C. Two distinctive behaviours were observed: alloys with at least 3 wt% aluminium showed excellent oxidation resistance in the whole temperature range. Alloys with 2 wt% or less aluminium exhibited good oxidation resistance up to 800 °C; but as the temperature was further increased, the oxidation rate of these alloys increased and became comparable to that of pure copper. A kinetic model was developed to explain the oxidation behaviour and indirectly determine the amount of dissolved oxygen in the alloys tested. It was found that the oxygen dissolved in alloys with up to 2 wt% Al exceeded its solubility limit in copper, whereas the dissolved oxygen in alloys with higher aluminium contents was below the solubility limit. This difference may account for the significantly different oxidation resistance.     

Stabilised finite element methods for a bending moment formulation of the Reissner-Mindlin plate model

This work presents new stabilised finite element methods for a bending moments formulation of the Reissner-Mindlin plate model. The introduction of the bending moment as an extra unknown leads to a new weak formulation, where the symmetry of this variable is imposed strongly in the space. This weak problem is proved to be well-posed, and stabilised Galerkin schemes for its discretisation are presented and analysed. The finite element methods are such that the bending moment tensor is sought in a finite element space constituted of piecewise linear continuos and symmetric tensors. Optimal error estimates are proved, and these findings are illustrated by representative numerical experiments.