A concept of water usage efficiency to support water reduction in manufacturing industry

Increasing pressures on freshwater supplies, continuity of supply uncertainties, and costs linked to legislative compliance, such as for wastewater treatment, are driving water use reduction up the agenda of manufacturing businesses. A survey is presented of current analysis methods and tools generally available to industry to analyze environmental impact of, and to manage, water use. These include life cycle analysis, water footprinting, strategic planning, water auditing, and process integration. It is identified that the methods surveyed do not provide insight into the operational requirements from individual process steps for water, instead taking such requirements as a given. We argue that such understanding is required for a proactive approach to long-term water usage reduction, in which sustainability is taken into account at the design stage for both process and product. As a first step to achieving this, we propose a concept of water usage efficiency which can be used to evaluate current and proposed processes and products. Three measures of efficiency are defined, supported by a framework of a detailed categorization and representation of water flows within a production system. The calculation of the efficiency measures is illustrated using the example of a tomato sauce production line. Finally, the elements required to create a useable tool based on the efficiency measures are discussed

Toray End-board Loading Station

Los Alamos National Laboratories presented team Atolla Nuclear the task of safeguarding a floating nuclear power plant. This new concept was narrowed down into protecting the spent nuclear fuel for floating nuclear reactors. The product designed was a remotely controlled flotation device for the spent nuclear fuel casks. This product, appropriately named Atolla Float, is capable of protecting the spent nuclear fuel up to twelve kilometers off of the coastline. Atolla Float was designed capable of remotely inflating at a depth of up to one hundred meters under the surface of the ocean, the maximum depth of the ocean at a distance of twelve kilometers from the coastline. To inflate at that depth, the flotation device is able to overcome the hydrodynamic pressure at a depth of one hundred meters. The engineering analysis determined a torus shape for flotation bladder that attaches to a steel collar secured to the spent nuclear fuel cask. This cask can remain under the ocean during an attack and be inflated remotely as soon as the reactor is secured. In this report, a time line was created for developing this product and a detailed financial analysis was done on the product. This includes the projected costs as well as the actual costs spent on the prototypes. A detailed market analysis was included. The patents researched and used were included in the report. Design specifications were evaluated for the product and explained in the report including numerical data to show what the Atolla Float must be capable of. From the design specifications, one hundred and twenty design concepts were generated. It was from these concepts that the design idea for Atolla Float was chosen. After Atolla Float was chosen, it was evaluated and put into a quality function deployment chart. This chart evaluated the design requirements and the customer requirements. Team Atolla Nuclear worked extremely hard to develop a detailed product design and corresponding models in solid works modeling software. A complete finite element analysis and engineering analysis on the design was completed. Through calculations and finite element analysis, the concept was proven for Atolla Float. With the help of Los Alamos, team Atolla Nuclear has developed an innovative design to secure spent nuclear material for floating nuclear reactor. It is the first of its design and will be valuable to companies and countries investing in floating nuclear reactors. This product encompasses the entirety of safeguards of design for a floating nuclear reactor

Analysis and optimisation of SPL products using goal models.

https://conf.researchr.org/details/RE-2023/RE-2023-Research-Papers/10/Analysis-and-optimisation-of-SPL-products-using-goal-modelsThe Internet of Things is one of the core drivers of variability modelling and requires explicit mechanisms to manage it. A key technology for addressing this variability is product line engineering. This approach uses a reference architecture to establish a well-designed set of assets that fit together, the Software Product Line (SPL). One of the limitations of variability models is they do not provide information about the quality of new products or how they achieve stakeholder requirements. Several approaches tackle this issue by integrating variability models with goal models. The main challenge is conciliating the different variability perspectives to make the joint use of both models possible without the loss of information or alterations to the models’ semantics. In this work, we present a framework for analysing and optimising SPL products considering stakeholders’ requirements that respects the semantics of both models. The framework is based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP), a field of mathematical programming. Variability and goal models are formalised as a set of linear constraints and are linked using mapping functions. As a proof of concept, we present a tool that takes both models and mapping functions to generate an ILP problem that can be solved using Matlab.This work is supported by the projects IRIS PID2021-12281 2OB-I00 (co-financed by FEDER funds) and by DISCO B1- 201212 funded by Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A concept of water usage efficiency to support water reduction in manufacturing industry

Increasing pressures on freshwater supplies, continuity of supply uncertainties, and costs linked to legislative compliance, such as for wastewater treatment, are driving water use reduction up the agenda of manufacturing businesses. A survey is presented of current analysis methods and tools generally available to industry to analyze environmental impact of, and to manage, water use. These include life cycle analysis, water footprinting, strategic planning, water auditing, and process integration. It is identified that the methods surveyed do not provide insight into the operational requirements from individual process steps for water, instead taking such requirements as a given. We argue that such understanding is required for a proactive approach to long-term water usage reduction, in which sustainability is taken into account at the design stage for both process and product. As a first step to achieving this, we propose a concept of water usage efficiency which can be used to evaluate current and proposed processes and products. Three measures of efficiency are defined, supported by a framework of a detailed categorization and representation of water flows within a production system. The calculation of the efficiency measures is illustrated using the example of a tomato sauce production line. Finally, the elements required to create a useable tool based on the efficiency measures are discussed

Essays on Retail Store Delivery System Design Strategies

This research develops and empirically tests multiple theory-based models of retail store design strategies. Specifically, we examine the impact that different `bricks and mortar\u27 (store channel) service delivery system design strategies have on merchandise retailer effectiveness; which we measure in terms of satisfaction, operating, and financial performance. We draw our theory from a multidisciplinary literature base in the areas of organizational design, service marketing and operations strategy, retail management, and analyses of capital markets. The aim is to provide insights for advancing service operations research and to offer retail store managers and designers a method to weigh the tradeoffs associated with specific store design choices. In particular, retailers can test the effectiveness of their store design strategies using these performance models. Towards this end, three essays are developed to address gaps in the extant service operations and marketing literatures with respect to the evaluation of retail store design strategies that focus on customer service encounters and environmental changes. We use a combination of empirical methods, including survey and dynamic panel data analysis techniques, to address the several important issues. First, we conduct a field survey of 175 store managers in the Southeast U.S. to develop and empirically validate multi-item measures of important retail store design factors that can be used by retail store managers to monitor the alignment of the service concept intent to actual store operating design strategies. In the second essay, we construct a retail store design strategy model to show the structural links among store operating complexity factors, customer information requirements, store encounter design choices, and customer satisfaction. We find that the store\u27s perception of customer service encounter information requirements is the primary motivator of customer encounter store design choice - particularly how much stores will use design for customer self-selection or will give task empowerment to front-line store employees. We establish an important link between high customer information requirements and the need to use more front-line employee empowerment to enhance both employee and customer satisfaction. Finally, the third essay applies panel data collected from retail company 10-K reports and the Compustat financial database, to examine retailer store system design responses to product line margin shifts over time. We operationalize measures of store system `design responsiveness\u27 to evaluate retail firm design performance. Using econometric modeling and dynamic panel analysis techniques, we find that aligning store capital with product margin shifts over time is critical to grow firm profits. Moreover, we find that not aligning store labor requirements with product margins tends to quickly diminish retail firm performance. While the financial benefits of being design responsive are seen only in the short-term, there may also be positive carryover effects of being responsive on forward customer satisfaction scores. Collectively, these essays argue for the importance of aligning store design strategy decisions with retail-specific operational complexity factors to promote the long-term sustainability and survival of retail service firms

Generative Design In Factory Layout Planning: An Application Of Evolutionary Computing Within The Creation Of Production Logistic Concepts

This paper describes the creation and application of a generative design approach in the production logistics layout concept creation as part of factory planning projects. Production systems evermore are influenced by an increase of product variants during the planning stages as well as shorter replanning cycles due to higher agility requirements to the production system. Thus, requiring the planner to more frequently conduct the highly complex planning procedure of creating layout concepts for the material supply within the assembly line. Currently, mathematical or graphical assignment methods are executed but are often used disjunct and are not used jointly. Furthermore, today’s planning methods are mainly based on manual planning and assignment activities. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper elaborates the application and usability of generative design methods for production logistics planning. As first step the scope and requirements definition for the new production logistics layout application is conducted. Afterwards, generative design, including a multi-objective genetic algorithm, is used to serve as a solution to compile and search through the high-dimensional solution space of all possible logistic layout concepts. Here, layout restrictions and production goals, such as cost and time savings, are reconciled. After the design creation and evaluation by the algorithm, the planner overviews the results and enhances the design parameters until a final concept is reached. This paper concludes with a SWOT analysis of the new planning approach to investigate the used methods, evaluate the impact of the approach on planner’s work and identify additional research potentials of using the generative design for other factory planning domains

Low-energy ion beamline scattering apparatus for surface science investigations

We report on the design, construction, and performance of a high current (monolayers/s), mass-filtered ion beamline system for surface scattering studies using inert and reactive species at collision energies below 1500 eV. The system combines a high-density inductively coupled plasma ion source, high-voltage floating beam transport line with magnet mass-filter and neutral stripping, decelerator, and broad based detection capabilities (ions and neutrals in both mass and energy) for products leaving the target surface. The entire system was designed from the ground up to be a robust platform to study ion-surface interactions from a more global perspective, i.e., high fluxes (>100 µA/cm2) of a single ion species at low, tunable energy (50–1400±5 eV full width half maximum) can be delivered to a grounded target under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. The high current at low energy problem is solved using an accel-decel transport scheme where ions are created at the desired collision energy in the plasma source, extracted and accelerated to high transport energy (20 keV to fight space charge repulsion), and then decelerated back down to their original creation potential right before impacting the grounded target. Scattered species and those originating from the surface are directly analyzed in energy and mass using a triply pumped, hybrid detector composed of an electron impact ionizer, hemispherical electrostatic sector, and rf/dc quadrupole in series. With such a system, the collision kinematics, charge exchange, and chemistry occurring on the target surface can be separated by fully analyzing the scattered product flux. Key design aspects of the plasma source, beamline, and detection system are emphasized here to highlight how to work around physical limitations associated with high beam flux at low energy, pumping requirements, beam focusing, and scattered product analysis. Operational details of the beamline are discussed from the perspective of available beam current, mass resolution, projectile energy spread, and energy tunability. As well, performance of the overall system is demonstrated through three proof-of-concept examples: (1) elastic binary collisions at low energy, (2) core-level charge exchange reactions involving 20Ne+ with Mg/Al/Si/P targets, and (3) reactive scattering of CF2+/CF3+ off Si. These studies clearly demonstrate why low, tunable incident energy, as well as mass and energy filtering of products leaving the target surface is advantageous and often essential for studies of inelastic energy losses, hard-collision charge exchange, and chemical reactions that occur during ion-surface scattering

Automatic allocation of safety requirements to components of a software product line

Safety critical systems developed as part of a product line must still comply with safety standards. Standards use the concept of Safety Integrity Levels (SILs) to drive the assignment of system safety requirements to components of a system under design. However, for a Software Product Line (SPL), the safety requirements that need to be allocated to a component may vary in different products. Variation in design can indeed change the possible hazards incurred in each product, their causes, and can alter the safety requirements placed on individual components in different SPL products. Establishing common SILs for components of a large scale SPL by considering all possible usage scenarios, is desirable for economies of scale, but it also poses challenges to the safety engineering process. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic allocation of SILs to components of a product line. The approach is applied to a Hybrid Braking System SPL design