Search results for "manufacturing"

Performance Dissimilarities in European Union Manufacturing: The Effect of Ownership and Technological Intensity

2021

Our paper addresses the relevance of a set of continuous and categorical variables that describe industry characteristics to differences in performance between foreign versus locally owned companies in industries with dissimilar levels of technological intensity. Including data on manufacturing sector performance from 20 European Union member countries and covering the 2009–2016 period, we used the random forests methodology to identify the best predictors of EU manufacturing industries’ a priori classification based on two main attributes: ownership (foreign versus local) and technological intensity. We found that EU foreign-owned businesses dominate locally owned ones in terms of size, wh…

FRP reinforcement for concrete structures: state-of-the-art review of application and design

2014

Fiber reinforced polymers (FRPs) are considered to be a promising alternative to steel reinforcement, especially in concrete structures subjected to an aggressive environment or to the effects of electromagnetic fields. Although attempts to develop effective reinforcement have been followed, the application of FRPs remains limited by the solution to simple structural problems that mainly appear due to the absence of design codes, significant variation in the material properties of FRP composites and limited knowledge gained by engineers as regards the application aspects of FRP composites and structural mechanics of concrete elements reinforced with FRPs. To fill the latter gap, the current…

Active disturbance rejection control of linear induction motor

2017

This paper proposes the theoretical framework and the experimental application of the active disturbance rejection control to linear induction motors. Such a nonlinear control (ADRC) technique can be viewed as a particular kind of input-output linearization control, where the nonlinear transformation of the state is not computed by means of the model, but it is estimated online. Such an approach permits to cope with unmodelling dynamics, as well as uncertainty in the knowledge of the model parameters and exogenous disturbances. The effectiveness of the proposed ADRC control law has been verified both by numerical simulations and experimentally on a suitably developed test setup. Moreover, t…

Electrical Safety Analysis in the Presence of Resonant Grounding Neutral

2019

The resonant grounding is one of the possible methods of the system neutral grounding for the medium voltage distribution. IEEE standards do define this grounding configuration, but important advantages and drawbacks of the resonant grounding might not be fully known, due to its rather uncommon application in North America. On the other hand, resonant grounding in Europe is imposed by the increased requirements for power quality, especially for medium-voltage (MV) industrial users, imposed to electric utilities by regulatory authorities, with the purpose to protect the interests of users and consumers. Level of the continuity of the service, magnitude and phase of ground-fault currents, mag…

Forensic Analysis of Fire in a Substation of a Commercial Center

2020

In this article, the authors discuss the legal liabilities of the professional engineer as both the engineer of record of a project and the construction site manager. In particular, this article analyzes the case of a fire at the end-user medium voltage–low-voltage (MV–LV) substation of a shopping center in Italy, which occurred a few years after the maintenance works on the electrical installation. The professional engineer who had designed and overseen the construction of the substation was accused of professional negligence. The authors through the examination of applicable technical standards, as well as of safety regulations, demonstrate that the professional engineer had acted diligen…

Review article: recommended reading list of early publications on atomic layer deposition - outcome of the "virtual Project on the History of ALD"

2017

Atomic layer deposition (ALD), a gas-phase thin film deposition technique based on repeated, self-terminating gas-solid reactions, has become the method of choice in semiconductor manufacturing and many other technological areas for depositing thin conformal inorganic material layers for various applications. ALD has been discovered and developed independently, at least twice, under different names: atomic layer epitaxy (ALE) and molecular layering. ALE, dating back to 1974 in Finland, has been commonly known as the origin of ALD, while work done since the 1960s in the Soviet Union under the name "molecular layering" (and sometimes other names) has remained much less known. The virtual proj…

Review Article: Recommended reading list of early publications on atomic layer deposition—Outcome of the “Virtual Project on the History of ALD”

2017

ESTIMATING SOIL PARTICLE-SIZE DISTRIBUTION FOR SICILIAN SOILS

2009

The soil particle-size distribution (PSD) is commonly used for soil classification and for estimating soil behavior. An accurate mathematical representation of the PSD is required to estimate soil hydraulic properties and to compare texture measurements from different classification systems. The objective of this study was to evaluate the ability of the Haverkamp and Parlange (HP) and Fredlund et al. (F) PSD models to fit 243 measured PSDs from a wide range of 38 005_Bagarello(547)_33 18-11-2009 11:55 Pagina 38 soil textures in Sicily and to test the effect of the number of measured particle diameters on the fitting of the theoretical PSD. For each soil textural class, the best fitting perf…

Fibre fragment distribution in a single-fibre composite tension test

2001

Abstract Single fibre fragmentation tests are performed for brittle fibres with Weibull strength distribution and different surface treatments. The fragmentation process is modelled and closed-form expressions for break spacing distribution are obtained. The model accounts for the effect of finite fibre length on the initial fragmentation as well as for break interaction on the advanced fragmentation stage. It is assumed that the exclusion zone due to fibre–matrix interface failure and stress recovery in the fibre is linearly dependent on the applied load. This assumption is validated experimentally. The derived theoretical average fragment length dependence on applied load is used to deter…

Los Sistemas Productivos, el Aprendizaje Interno y los Resultados del Área de Producción de Baldosas-Cerámicas

2009

El objetivo de la investigacion es comprobar la validez del modelo universal de gestion en la estrategia de produccion en el sector de fabricantes de pavimentos y baldosas ceramicas espanoles. El trabajo se centra en las decisiones de infraestructura, y pretende resaltar el efecto de los recursos internos y externos sobre la ventaja competitiva del area de produccion de las empresas. Los datos utilizados corresponden a 76 empresas espanolas fabricantes de pavimentos ceramicos. Los resultados obtenidos permiten comprobar que en este sector los recursos implantados guardan poca relacion con las prioridades manifestadas. Ademas, se demuestra que la ventaja competitiva esta mas explicada por el…