Incident Management System for a Global Company

PresentationThe global implementation of an incident management and action tracking system is no easy task. There is a multitude of good intentions and lots of moving parts. Although everyone is trying to do the right thing from initial rollout, there are lessons learned along the way that will, in the end, solidify your already existing incident management system. A global, mid-size company of about 3,200 employees learned and applied these lessons during a three-phase incident management system rollout to three different geographical areas: the Americas, Asia and Europe. The challenges faced were not only geographical and cultural; they were also a result of the different legacy safety philosophies that come with joint ventures and new partnerships in the ever changing chemical industry. This paper discusses the initial approach all the way through to the end. Going back to basics: defining what an incident is, what types of incidents would be tracked, and what the requirements for an investigation were going to be. This paired with the lessons that were learned after each phased rollout resulted in the successful implementation of a global incident management procedure and software system; the lessons being continuously learned would make for an even more successful rollout in the future

Self consistent determination of plasmonic resonances in ternary nanocomposites

We have developed a self consistent technique to predict the behavior of plasmon resonances in multi-component systems as a function of wavelength. This approach, based on the tight lower bounds of the Bergman-Milton formulation, is able to predict experimental optical data, including the positions, shifts and shapes of plasmonic peaks in ternary nanocomposites without using any ftting parameters. Our approach is based on viewing the mixing of 3 components as the mixing of 2 binary mixtures, each in the same host. We obtained excellent predictions of the experimental optical behavior for mixtures of Ag:Cu:SiO2 and alloys of Au-Cu:SiO2 and Ag-Au:H2 O, suggesting that the essential physics of plasmonic behavior is captured by this approach.Comment: 7 pages and 4 figure

Investigation of pulsed laser induced dewetting in nanoscopic metal films

Hydrodynamic pattern formation (PF) and dewetting resulting from pulsed laser induced melting of nanoscopic metal films have been used to create spatially ordered metal nanoparticle arrays with monomodal size distribution on SiO_{\text{2}}/Si substrates. PF was investigated for film thickness h\leq7 nm < laser absorption depth \sim11 nm and different sets of laser parameters, including energy density E and the irradiation time, as measured by the number of pulses n. PF was only observed to occur for E\geq E_{m}, where E_{m} denotes the h-dependent threshold energy required to melt the film. Even at such small length scales, theoretical predictions for E_{m} obtained from a continuum-level lumped parameter heat transfer model for the film temperature, coupled with the 1-D transient heat equation for the substrate phase, were consistent with experimental observations provided that the thickness dependence of the reflectivity of the metal-substrate bilayer was incorporated into the analysis. The spacing between the nanoparticles and the particle diameter were found to increase as h^{2} and h^{5/3} respectively, which is consistent with the predictions of the thin film hydrodynamic (TFH) dewetting theory. These results suggest that fast thermal processing can lead to novel pattern formation, including quenching of a wide range of length scales and morphologies.Comment: 36 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl