Plastic deformation wear in modified medium manganese steel

A medium manganese steel with high wear-resistance, strength and toughness has been produced with addition of a complex modifier (or refining agent) containing Nb, N, RE and Si-Ca. The results showed that the wear resistance, strength and toughness of the modified medium manganese steel are respectively 1.92 times, 1.45 times and 3.63 times as high as that of the referenced unmodified medium manganese steel. The plastic deformation characteristic involved in the wear mechanism of the modified medium manganese steel was investigated by means of plastic-elasticity calculation and TEM electro-microscopy. The relationship between wear resistance and yield strength of the steel was established. Since the wear volume W is proportional to the square of the loading and to the numbers of the abrasives, and inversely proportional to the square of the yield strength of the materials, the wear resistance can be substantially improved by the enhancement of yield strength of the materials. The calculation results generally agreed with the experimental results

Conceptualization of safety leadership in Malaysia's manufacturing companies

In the new global economy, workplace safety has become a central issue among companies all over the world. It is becoming difficult to ignore that this trend has also been happening in Malaysia especially the manufacturing sector. The worrying trend can be seen from the increasing number of workplace accident reported by Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH), Malaysia in manufacturing companies. In recent years, researchers have shown an interest in studying the role of safety leadership to reduce workplace accidents. It is found that safety leadership plays a significant role in ensuring a safe and sound workplace. Due to this concern, this paper attempts to provide a conceptualization of safety leadership from the perspective of Malaysia’s manufacturing sector. It is proposed that positive safety leadership leads to reduction of workplace accidents. In response to this matter, it is hypothesized that the higher level of safety leadership will affect the lower level of workplace accidents. A questionnaire from Wu et al. (2008) will be adopted to explain the conceptualization of safety leadership, it is expected that the concept of safety leadership practiced in Malaysia’s manufacturing sector has a similar meaning from the perspective of western researchers

Enhancing thermoelectric figure-of-merit by low-dimensional electrical transport in phonon-glass crystals

Low-dimensional electronic and glassy phononic transport are two important ingredients of highly-efficient thermoelectric material, from which two branches of the thermoelectric research emerge. One focuses on controlling electronic transport in the low dimension, while the other on multiscale phonon engineering in the bulk. Recent work has benefited much from combining these two approaches, e.g., phonon engineering in low-dimensional materials. Here, we propose to employ the low-dimensional electronic structure in bulk phonon-glass crystal as an alternative way to increase the thermoelectric efficiency. Through first-principles electronic structure calculation and classical molecular dynamics simulation, we show that the $\pi$-$\pi$ stacking Bis-Dithienothiophene molecular crystal is a natural candidate for such an approach. This is determined by the nature of its chemical bonding. Without any optimization of the material parameter, we obtain a maximum room-temperature figure of merit, $ZT$, of $1.48$ at optimal doping, thus validating our idea.Comment: Nano Lett.201

RF-thermal-structural-RF coupled analysis on the travelling wave disk-loaded accelerating structure

Travelling wave (TW) disk-loaded accelerating structure is one of the key components in normal conducting (NC) linear accelerators, and has been studied for many years. In the design process, usually after the dimensions of each cell and the two couplers are finalized, the structure is fabricated and tuned, and then the whole structure characteristics can be measured by the vector network analyzer. Before the structure fabrication, the whole structure characteristics are less simulated limited by the available computer capability. In this paper, we described the method to do the RF-thermal-structural-RF coupled analysis on the TW disk-loaded structure with one single PC. In order to validate our method, we first analyzed and compared our RF simulation results on the 3m long BEPCII structure with the corresponding experimental results, which shows very good consistency. Finally, the RF-thermal-structure-RF coupled analysis results on the 1.35m long NSC KIPT linac accelerating structure are presented.Comment: 5 pages, 16 figures, Submitted to the Chinese Physics C (Formerly High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics

Effective crowd anomaly detection through spatio-temporal texture analysis

Abnormal crowd behaviors in high density situations can pose great danger to public safety. Despite the extensive installation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, it is still difficult to achieve real-time alerts and automated responses from current systems. Two major breakthroughs have been reported in this research. Firstly, a spatial-temporal texture extraction algorithm is developed. This algorithm is able to effectively extract video textures with abundant crowd motion details. It is through adopting Gabor-filtered textures with the highest information entropy values. Secondly, a novel scheme for defining crowd motion patterns (signatures) is devised to identify abnormal behaviors in the crowd by employing an enhanced gray level co-occurrence matrix model. In the experiments, various classic classifiers are utilized to benchmark the performance of the proposed method. The results obtained exhibit detection and accuracy rates which are, overall, superior to other techniques

A Comparative Study of Female Retirement Awareness and Readiness in Malaysia and China

A phenomenon has emerged whereby the life expectancy of women is 74.2 years, and men's is 69.8 years. Hence, it is crucial to encourage early retirement planning among women. This study explores the factors influencing retirement planning awareness and readiness among women in Malaysia and China. 100 Malaysians and 200 Chinese completed a self-administered online questionnaire. Using IBM SPSS and SmartPLS, the determinants examined the moderating effect of self-efficacy toward retirement readiness. This study will provide valuable insights for policymakers to adopt better strategies to address women's issues and improve their quality of life. Keywords: Female Retirement Planning; Comparing Malaysia and China; Gender Equality; Quality of Life eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2023. The Authors. Published for AMER & cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), College of Built Environment, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DO

All the wiser: Fake news intervention using user reading preferences

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ