244,251 research outputs found
Sustainability of the chemical manufacturing industry - Towards a new paradigm?
This paper describes the current situation of the chemicalmanufacturingindustry, with special reference to Europe and looks to the future sustainability demands on the sector, and the implications of these demands for chemical engineering education. These implications include definitions of sustainability criteria for the sector and the need for transparent reporting under the Triple Bottom Line approach. The response of the education system to the sustainability agenda over the years and a number of strategies to incorporate it into courses are described. The important role of chemical (or more generally, process) engineers in delivering sustainable solutions is emphasised but this also suggests that anew way of thinking about the discipline is required. Indeed, this paper argues that the demand for a sustainable chemicalmanufacturing sector could bring about the next paradigm shift in the discipline which has been predicted for some time
Scrum2Kanban: Integrating Kanban and Scrum in a University Software Engineering Capstone Course
Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development
methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in
professional software development. This usually means students are introduced
to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However,
as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to
different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of
this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the
industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds the
hands-on learning of the lean principles advocated by Kanban into a capstone
project run with Scrum. This both ensures that students are aware of recent
process frameworks and ideas as well as gain a more thorough overview of how
agile methods can be employed in practice. We describe the details of the
course and analyze the participating students' perceptions as well as our
observations. We analyze the development artifacts, created by students during
the course in respect to the two different development methodologies. We
further present a summary of the lessons learned as well as recommendations for
future similar courses. The survey conducted at the end of the course revealed
an overwhelmingly positive attitude of students towards the integration of
Kanban into the course
Traceability for Model Driven, Software Product Line Engineering
Traceability is an important challenge for software organizations. This is true for traditional software development and even more so in new approaches that introduce more variety of artefacts such as Model Driven development or Software Product Lines. In this paper we look at some aspect of the interaction of Traceability, Model Driven development and Software Product Line
A sparse-grid isogeometric solver
Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) typically adopts tensor-product splines and NURBS
as a basis for the approximation of the solution of PDEs. In this work, we
investigate to which extent IGA solvers can benefit from the so-called
sparse-grids construction in its combination technique form, which was first
introduced in the early 90s in the context of the approximation of
high-dimensional PDEs. The tests that we report show that, in accordance to the
literature, a sparse-grid construction can indeed be useful if the solution of
the PDE at hand is sufficiently smooth. Sparse grids can also be useful in the
case of non-smooth solutions when some a-priori knowledge on the location of
the singularities of the solution can be exploited to devise suitable
non-equispaced meshes. Finally, we remark that sparse grids can be seen as a
simple way to parallelize pre-existing serial IGA solvers in a straightforward
fashion, which can be beneficial in many practical situations.Comment: updated version after revie
Manufacturing in the 1990s - productivity, flexibility and innovation
The article outlines the evolution of large multinationals as a result of the appearance of new market demands. Companies having to meet specific market demands, are shown to possess certain characteristics, related to the market demands concerned. The analysis shows that innovativeness will, in all probability, be the new market demand in the 1990s, in addition to the already existing ones of efficiency, quality and flexibility. Descriptions of ideal types illustrate the evolution of companies as they move from the Efficient Firm to the Quality Firm on to the Flexible Firm to, finally, the Innovative Firm. The phase model also includes the symptoms of crisis, when moving from one phase to another. Skipping phases appears to be difficult, if not impossible. The same holds true for moving to the next phase, while the organization has not finished with the preceding phase
An Eulerian projection method for quasi-static elastoplasticity
A well-established numerical approach to solve the Navier--Stokes equations
for incompressible fluids is Chorin's projection method, whereby the fluid
velocity is explicitly updated, and then an elliptic problem for the pressure
is solved, which is used to orthogonally project the velocity field to maintain
the incompressibility constraint. In this paper, we develop a mathematical
correspondence between Newtonian fluids in the incompressible limit and
hypo-elastoplastic solids in the slow, quasi-static limit. Using this
correspondence, we formulate a new fixed-grid, Eulerian numerical method for
simulating quasi-static hypo-elastoplastic solids, whereby the stress is
explicitly updated, and then an elliptic problem for the velocity is solved,
which is used to orthogonally project the stress to maintain the
quasi-staticity constraint. We develop a finite-difference implementation of
the method and apply it to an elasto-viscoplastic model of a bulk metallic
glass based on the shear transformation zone theory. We show that in a
two-dimensional plane strain simple shear simulation, the method is in
quantitative agreement with an explicit method. Like the fluid projection
method, it is efficient and numerically robust, making it practical for a wide
variety of applications. We also demonstrate that the method can be extended to
simulate objects with evolving boundaries. We highlight a number of
correspondences between incompressible fluid mechanics and quasi-static
elastoplasticity, creating possibilities for translating other numerical
methods between the two classes of physical problems.Comment: 49 pages, 20 figure
Information Physics: The New Frontier
At this point in time, two major areas of physics, statistical mechanics and
quantum mechanics, rest on the foundations of probability and entropy. The last
century saw several significant fundamental advances in our understanding of
the process of inference, which make it clear that these are inferential
theories. That is, rather than being a description of the behavior of the
universe, these theories describe how observers can make optimal predictions
about the universe. In such a picture, information plays a critical role. What
is more is that little clues, such as the fact that black holes have entropy,
continue to suggest that information is fundamental to physics in general.
In the last decade, our fundamental understanding of probability theory has
led to a Bayesian revolution. In addition, we have come to recognize that the
foundations go far deeper and that Cox's approach of generalizing a Boolean
algebra to a probability calculus is the first specific example of the more
fundamental idea of assigning valuations to partially-ordered sets. By
considering this as a natural way to introduce quantification to the more
fundamental notion of ordering, one obtains an entirely new way of deriving
physical laws. I will introduce this new way of thinking by demonstrating how
one can quantify partially-ordered sets and, in the process, derive physical
laws. The implication is that physical law does not reflect the order in the
universe, instead it is derived from the order imposed by our description of
the universe. Information physics, which is based on understanding the ways in
which we both quantify and process information about the world around us, is a
fundamentally new approach to science.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures. Knuth K.H. 2010. Information physics: The new
frontier. J.-F. Bercher, P. Bessi\`ere, and A. Mohammad-Djafari (eds.)
Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering
(MaxEnt 2010), Chamonix, France, July 201
Novel Cooling Strategy for Electronic Packages: Directly Injected Cooling
This publication discusses domain integration of various engineering disciplines as an effective methodology to design new and innovative products. A case study illustrates how this approach is applied to the design process of a high performance electronic product. A novel and improved method for the cooling of electronic packages is presented. Standard package types, as for instance ball grid arrays, are equipped with directly injected cooling. The developed design is a very cost effective solution, as fewer productions steps and fewer procured parts are required compared to traditional cooling. The new design is also easily scalable, as multiple components on an electronic product can be cooled both uniformly and simultaneously. This allows for more overall design flexibility, which can result in a more integrated product design with advantages in terms of performance, volume, weight and production efficiency
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