Special Issue of the Manufacturing Engineering Society (MES)

This book derives from the Special Issue of the Manufacturing Engineering Society (MES) that was launched as a Special Issue of the journal Materials. The 48 contributions, published in this book, explore the evolution of traditional manufacturing models toward the new requirements of the Manufacturing Industry 4.0 and present cutting-edge advances in the field of Manufacturing Engineering focusing on additive manufacturing and 3D printing, advances and innovations in manufacturing processes, sustainable and green manufacturing, manufacturing systems (machines, equipment and tooling), metrology and quality in manufacturing, Industry 4.0, product lifecycle management (PLM) technologies, and production planning and risks

Digital twin and its implementations in the civil engineering sector

Digital Twin (DT) concept has recently emerged in civil engineering; however, some problems still need to be addressed. First, DT can be easily confused with Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Second, the constituents of DT applications in this sector are not well-defined. Also, what the DT can bring to the civil engineering industry is still ambiguous. To address these problems, we reviewed 468 articles related to DT, BIM and CPS, proposed a DT definition and its constituents in civil engineering and compared DT with BIM and CPS. Then we reviewed 134 papers related to DT in the civil engineering sector out of 468 papers in detail. We extracted DT research clusters based on the co-occurrence analysis of paper keywords' and the relevant DT constituents. This research helps establish the state-of-the-art of DT in the civil engineering sector and suggests future DT development

Knowledge-based support in Non-Destructive Testing for health monitoring of aircraft structures

Maintenance manuals include general methods and procedures for industrial maintenance and they contain information about principles of maintenance methods. Particularly, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods are important for the detection of aeronautical defects and they can be used for various kinds of material and in different environments. Conventional non-destructive evaluation inspections are done at periodic maintenance checks. Usually, the list of tools used in a maintenance program is simply located in the introduction of manuals, without any precision as regards to their characteristics, except for a short description of the manufacturer and tasks in which they are employed. Improving the identification concepts of the maintenance tools is needed to manage the set of equipments and establish a system of equivalence: it is necessary to have a consistent maintenance conceptualization, flexible enough to fit all current equipment, but also all those likely to be added/used in the future. Our contribution is related to the formal specification of the system of functional equivalences that can facilitate the maintenance activities with means to determine whether a tool can be substituted for another by observing their key parameters in the identified characteristics. Reasoning mechanisms of conceptual graphs constitute the baseline elements to measure the fit or unfit between an equipment model and a maintenance activity model. Graph operations are used for processing answers to a query and this graph-based approach to the search method is in-line with the logical view of information retrieval. The methodology described supports knowledge formalization and capitalization of experienced NDT practitioners. As a result, it enables the selection of a NDT technique and outlines its capabilities with acceptable alternatives

Advances on Mechanics, Design Engineering and Manufacturing III

This open access book gathers contributions presented at the International Joint Conference on Mechanics, Design Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing (JCM 2020), held as a web conference on June 2–4, 2020. It reports on cutting-edge topics in product design and manufacturing, such as industrial methods for integrated product and process design; innovative design; and computer-aided design. Further topics covered include virtual simulation and reverse engineering; additive manufacturing; product manufacturing; engineering methods in medicine and education; representation techniques; and nautical, aeronautics and aerospace design and modeling. The book is organized into four main parts, reflecting the focus and primary themes of the conference. The contributions presented here not only provide researchers, engineers and experts in a range of industrial engineering subfields with extensive information to support their daily work; they are also intended to stimulate new research directions, advanced applications of the methods discussed and future interdisciplinary collaborations

Mining Technologies Innovative Development

The present book covers the main challenges, important for future prospects of subsoils extraction as a public effective and profitable business, as well as technologically advanced industry. In the near future, the mining industry must overcome the problems of structural changes in raw materials demand and raise the productivity up to the level of high-tech industries to maintain the profits. This means the formation of a comprehensive and integral response to such challenges as the need for innovative modernization of mining equipment and an increase in its reliability, the widespread introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies in the activities of mining enterprises, the transition to "green mining" and the improvement of labor safety and avoidance of man-made accidents. The answer to these challenges is impossible without involving a wide range of scientific community in the publication of research results and exchange of views and ideas. To solve the problem, this book combines the works of researchers from the world's leading centers of mining science on the development of mining machines and mechanical systems, surface and underground geotechnology, mineral processing, digital systems in mining, mine ventilation and labor protection, and geo-ecology. A special place among them is given to post-mining technologies research

The energy analysis of burner reactor power systems

Currently most commercial nuclear power stations are based on thermal reactor designs called burner reactors which are. net consumers of fissile material. These power stations form one part of a larger system that generates electricity from uraniura. However, in addition to producing energy, such systems also consume energy, in the form of various fuels, during construction and operation. This thesis describes the use of energy analysis to determine the total energy required by these systems. A number of factors are shown to influence energy consumption and, in particular, the effect of extracting uranium from different sources is studied in detail. For ores, an important inverse relationship between energy use and ore grade is investigated and quantified. The physical limit at which the energy input to the system is equal to its output is shown to correspond to an average grade of 15 parts per million of "triuranium octoxide". Analysis of proposals for extracting uranium from seawater indicates that the only schemes giving a positive energy balance are'costly ($500/lb U308) and limited to low production rates. The effects of feedback within fuel systems are analysed and. the results are used to formulate an economic model in which nuclear electricity prices determine uranium ore costs as well as vice versa. The model demonstrates-that, with present'techniques, the average 6 economic limit to ore grade is 50 ppm U308 with subsequent resources, on current assessment, of only 107 tonnes U308. This contradicts most traditional studies which, by assuming fixed, non-dependent fuel costs, suggest an ore grade limit of less than 4 ppm U308 and economically recoverable resources in excess of 1010 tonnes U308

A hands-on manufacturing curriculum for high school students

The UTeachEngineering program in the Cockrell School of Engineering of The University of Texas at Austin has developed a high school engineering curriculum, Engineer Your World (EYW), with the intent of interesting students in pursuing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers. However, EYW currently contains no curriculum modules on manufacturing. In fact, a literature review shows very few high school manufacturing curricula, and these typically require state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities, thus making the curricula unaffordable to many schools. Thus, there is a need to develop a new manufacturing curriculum module to provide all schools with the opportunity to teach the breadth of the core concepts of manufacturing without being limited by constraints, such as finance, materials, facilities, etc. This thesis presents the details of such a module. The hands-on approach for teaching manufacturing bridges the gap between theory and practice. Students first learn manufacturing techniques in detail, and then manufacture a simple product using simple setups designed to provide concrete experience with a particular manufacturing process. The hypothesis is that, after completing the module, students’ understanding of manufacturing is increased compared to that before the module. This thesis describes the curriculum and its evaluation. The capstone module of the curriculum features an inexpensive surrogate manufacturing machine that can be assembled quickly by teachers or students to provide hands-on experience. The capstone module of the curriculum was tested with students from an engineering class in a high school in Austin, TX, USA. A pre-test/post test was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum. It was found that the curriculum was simple to understand and implement and also provided insights into manufacturing which are similar to what could be attained with a module using more expensive manufacturing equipment.Mechanical Engineerin