UK Rules For Unfired Pressure Vessels

The present code PD 5500, formerly BS 5500 [1] evolved partly from the well-known BS 1500 [2] in the 1950's and BS 1515 [3] first published in 1965; the latter permitted higher level allowable stresses and more advanced rules. In 1969, following a report from the Committee of Enquiry into the Pressure Vessel Industry, the British Standards Institution brought all the pressure vessel interests together under one general committee in order to rationalise the activity. This became PVE/ and presides over a large committee structure. There are a series of functional sub-committees who deal with specific aspects and a large number of technical committees as well as many additional sub committees and working groups. Most of these meet regularly. The technical committee PVE/1, Pressure Vessels, has overall responsibility for BS 5500. The functional committee PVE/1/15 Design Methods has an overall responsibility relating to 'Design' with particular reference to the design section of BS 5500 (Section 3). The first edition of BS 5500 was issued in 1976. The actual issue was delayed for some time because, in the early 1970's, there was an attempt in Europe to produce an international pressure vessel standard. A draft of the international standard appeared as ISO DIS 2694 [4] in 1973 but it was not generally accepted and the attempt was abandoned in the mid 70's. It was decided to use some of the material from 2694 within BS 5500 so that although the Standard was long delayed it benefited to some extent from the international efforts. Initially, committee PVE/l set out the concept of a "master" pressure vessel standard which could readily be applied to any vessel in either ferrous or non-ferrous materials and for highly specialised application with the minimum of supplementary requirements. The layout of BS 5500 is consistent with this concept and although the Standard has perhaps not fulfilled this high ideal, it has certainly been employed widely in many industries including non pressure vessel type applications. When issued it had a number of distinctive features compared with other pressure codes viz; weld joint factors were removed, the present three categories of construction were introduced, there was a new novel external pressure section, it has a loose leaf format and an annual updating was introduced. Further editions of BS 5500 have been issued every three years since 1982

Enterprise Systems Implementation and their Impact on Employee Job Outcomes. A review of the literature, synthesis, and framework

Enterprise Systems (ESs) integrate business processes to enhance organizational effectiveness. Organizations make huge investments in procuring and implementing ESs to effectively manage their resources to achieve strategic decision-making and improve operational excellence. Irrespective of the investments, it has become increasingly difficult to reap the full benefits of the systems being implemented. ESs implementation is a massive change event in organizations and in employees’ work routines that affect their day-to-day business activities impacting their job outcomes. To this end, the primary aim of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to synthesize the prior literature that explored the association between ESs implementation and employee job outcomes. Accordingly, our review study systematically analysed fifty empirical studies to identify themes that received substantial attention in the prior literature. The SLR uncovered key gaps, unearthed six themes, identified potential research areas, and proposed a comprehensive framework depicting the current research profile and potential avenues linking ESs and employee job outcomes. Our review provides significant implications for practice and research through the proposed comprehensive framework. We further suggest that ESs implementors need to consider job outcomes as crucial parameters during and post-implementation as successful implementation provides a strategic advantage to organizations and benefits employees

Understanding the impact of enterprise systems on management decision making: an agenda for future research

Enterprise systems have been widely sold on the basis that they reduce costs through process efficiency and enhance decision making by providing accurate and timely enterprise wide information. Although research shows that operational efficiencies can be achieved, ERP systems are notoriously poor at delivering management information in a form that would support effective decision‑making. Research suggests managers are not helped in their decision‑making abilities simply by increasing the flow of information. This paper calls for a new approach to researching the impact of ERP implementations on global organizations by examining decision making processes at 3 levels in the organisation (corporate, core implementation team and local site)

A Frugal Support Structure for New Software Implementations in SMEs

During software implementations, budgetary and human resource constraints often make it difficult for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to provide and maintain the required support. To overcome these constraints, this study describes a frugal support structure (FSS) to orchestrate available resources and to involve users as suppliers and co-creators of contextualized information. The FSS is conceptualized as a system that enables interaction and collaboration between the actors involved by using extant communication infrastructure wherever possible, systematizing and centralizing knowledge created and ensuring overall resource and time efficiency. Adopting a design science research process, development of the FSS combines a literature review and practical insights. Evaluating the challenges and benefits of FSS, the findings indicate that user involvement is necessary not only for contextualized and accessible support but to make support structures more frugal and sustainable in the long term

ALLSTAR Benchmarking: How Collaborating On Collecting And Sharing Data Is A Win-Win

We all know it’s hard to tell a library’s story to its stakeholders. Academic law libraries are expensive enterprises, and it’s challenging to capture the complete picture of the value that their resources, activities, and services provide. Consider as well the ever-increasing demands to augment services, while at the same time having to justify the need for new services and prove their cost-effectiveness In this environment, decision-makers need a clear understanding of what the library wants to accomplish, how it intends to meet its goals, and how it will measure success. What are the most important operations and services? Why are certain resources required? How is success determined? Enter ALLStAR Benchmarking

Implementing a Health Information System at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital in Ghana. End User Perspective.

Health can be improved by information and communication technologies (ICT) in developing countries. Electronic health systems coordinate patient care processes in different departments within the same facility to enhance efficient delivery of care. However, health sectors in developing countries are unable to implement modern health care technologies due to challenges which negatively impact their adoption of ICT. The refurbishment of the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (GARH) in Ghana has resulted in the first phase of an ultra-modern building and the procurement of a comprehensive health information system (HIS) known as Health Pro. The shakedown phase of the implementation of the Health Pro is crucial to its overall success. Thus, the acceptance of the Health Pro by the end users in this phase will play a vital role in its adoption into routine practices at the health facility. Challenges to the use of the Health Pro could negatively impact its acceptance and adoption which will then affect its successful implementation. The study aims to assess the challenges to the implementation of the Heath Pro in several departments as perceived by the health professionals. Interpretive research, specifically a case study was the research method used in this study. Health professionals at GARH were interviewed to provide the data for the study in addition to observations, photography and informal discussions. The top-down approach was used by the management of the health facility to implement the Health Pro. The involvement of the health professionals, the targeted users of the health information system was minimal at best. The health professionals at the frontline of the delivery of health care felt alienated in the design and development of the Health Pro. User perceptions prior to the use of a technology influence experiences and later, these experiences gained from using the technology influence the perception of it. Challenges to the implementation of the Health Pro include; unplanned and inadequate training of the health professionals, lack of communication regarding the Health Pro, delay in work processes and an incomplete implementation process. Addressing the challenges to the implementation process could enhance successful implementation of Health Pro. Nonetheless, the effect of Health Pro on work processes at the health facility cannot be fully assessed until it is fully implemented. Proper maintenance of the Health Pro after it is fully implemented will ensure its sustained implementation

Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI) for gears: Contact and bending fatigue behavior

Abstract Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI) represents an alternative solution for the manufacturing of the housing of small planetary gearboxes, with the gear teeth obtained directly on the housing itself: such solution combines a cost-effective process with the possibility of obtaining complex geometry of the case. With respect to most traditional solutions, by means of ADI the requirements of strength and accuracy of the gear teeth can be satisfied without an additional finishing step after the heat treatment: the teeth can be obtained by broaching and, thanks to the low distortion which can be granted by the austempering process, a subsequent finishing operation is not needed. For these reasons, ADI has been selected for the application to a family of small gearboxes for automation. Due to the limited experience and data available for such material, to improve the design and rating processes, a testing campaign has been performed. The aim was to obtain strength data for bending and contact fatigue, considering the specific manufacturing and heat treatment processes. The paper describes the test procedures adopted and the test results, which have been obtained on gears specimens by means of Single Tooth Fatigue (STF) and pitting tests on a FZG type bench respectively. The tests are supported by metallurgical investigations on the failed teeth, to describe and understand the failure mechanisms. The results are then compared with the data and the shape curves provided by the international standards

Peer-to-Peer Based Trading and File Distribution for Cloud Computing

In this dissertation we take a peer-to-peer approach to deal with two specific issues, fair trading and file distribution, arisen from data management for cloud computing. In mobile cloud computing environment cloud providers may collaborate with each other and essentially organize some dedicated resources as a peer to peer sharing system. One well-known problem in such peer to peer systems with exchange of resources is free riding. Providing incentives for peers to contribute to the system is an important issue in peer to peer systems. We design a reputation-based fair trading mechanism that favors peers with higher reputation. Based on the definition of the reputation used in the system, we derive a fair trading policy. We evaluate the performance of reputation-based trading mechanisms and highlight the scenarios in which they can make a difference. Distribution of data to the resources within a cloud or to different collaborating clouds efficiently is another issue in cloud computing. The delivery efficiency is dependent on the characteristics of the network links available among these network nodes and the mechanism that takes advantage of them. Our study is based on the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a testbed for researchers to build a virtual laboratory at scale to explore future Internets. Our study consists of two parts. First, we characterize the links in the GENI network. Even though GENI has been used in many research and education projects, there is no systematic study about what we can expect from the GENI testbeds from a performance perspective. The goal is to characterize the links of the GENI networks and provide guidance for GENI experiments. Second, we propose a peer to peer approach to file distribution for cloud computing. We develop a mechanism that uses multiple delivery trees as the distribution structure, which takes into consideration the measured performance information in the GENI network. Files are divided into chunks to improve parallelism among different delivery trees. With a strict scheduling mechanism for each chunk, we can reduce the overall time for getting the file to all relevant nodes. We evaluate the proposed mechanism and show that our mechanism can significantly reduce the overall delivery time