Energy and carbon footprint reduction during textile-based product design and manufacturing

Due to concerns over non-renewable energy consumption and associated emissions, industry has sought methods and technologies to support energy efficiency practices and use of alternative energy during product manufacturing, use, and end-of-life. Efforts have been undertaken to more precisely calculate environmental metrics, such as energy consumption and carbon footprint, to support broader sustainable design activities. The work reported endeavours to integrate sustainability principles into the design of products, manufacturing processes, and relevant supply chain networks to assist decision makers. Two backpacks are evaluated to examine the influence of design choices on energy consumption and carbon footprint. The study system boundary includes raw material extraction, materials processing, manufacturing operations, and transportation for each component. The results show that manufacturing processes dominate transportation-related impacts. The work appears to be the first to apply a comprehensive process-based approach to estimate cradle-to-gate energy consumption and carbon footprint for textile-based product design variants

Vaccine Distribution Strategies against Polio: An Analysis of Turkey Scenario

As a result of the ongoing Syrian civil war, almost 3 million refugees moved to Turkey since 2011 because of security reasons. However, the government operated refugee camps have been largely inadequate to accommodate this huge number of refugees. Therefore, almost 91% of the Syrian refugees live out of government-operated camps. According to a Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (AFAD) report, 45.4% of the children under 5 years old who live out of camps are not vaccinated against polio. This presents a serious health threat to the local population and the whole region. In order to deal with this potential risk, local vaccine distribution strategies that encourage vaccination should be developed for the cities that are close to Syrian border. We develop a mathematical model with which we determine the optimal number of polio vaccines that needs to be administered for each age group and the region considering the vaccination history of individuals. Different vaccination strategies (i) by age, (ii) by region, and (iii) by age-population are compared for cost effectiveness

Facility Location Selection for the Humanitarian Needs of Refugees

As a result of civil war in Syria and Turkey’s open-door policy, almost 3 million refugees moved to Turkey since March 2011. The unexpected arrival of a large number of refugees within a relatively short period of time caused inadequate planning of the government-operated camps to fulfill the humanitarian needs of those affected individuals. The purpose of this study is to develop an optimization model that helps in the distribution of humanitarian aid to the refugees. The multi-objective optimization model decides on the facility locations by integrating total transportation distance minimization and covered demand maximization. Uncertainties in the supply amount are captured through possible scenarios to determine the optimal facilities that will serve the demand points. We used a weighted sum method to solve the multi-objective optimization problem. Different weights are associated with the objective functions to represent the varying preferences of decision makers and examine how the optimal solution changes

Determination of Bus Station Locations under Emission and Social Cost Constraints

This study proposes a two-stage stochastic programming model to determine an optimal set of bus stations that minimizes operational, environmental, and social costs under uncertain weather conditions and customer perceptions on sustainability. The first stage of the proposed model focuses on the derivation of a set of bus stations under uncertain demand and weather conditions. Then, the second stage determines an optimal vehicle capacity (i.e., bus size) to minimize the impact of vehicle shortages. In the proposed model, different customer perceptions on sustainability are conceptualized through a range of dissatisfaction levels. Weather conditions are considered as causing higher dissatisfaction for vehicle shortages in certain seasons. The proposed model is applied to a numerical case study for a bus transit network in a college town. This study also analyzes the effect of human behavior on system costs by comparing the proposed model with a traditional approach. The results provide managerial insights on the fact that bus transit network design problems should allow for tradeoffs between different types of costs

Neurocognitive Evidence on the Impact of Topical Familiarity in Creative Outcomes

Engineering programs, in general, do not explicitly address the need to enhance divergent thinking. To a certain extent this is due to a lack in knowledge on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying divergent thinking, and creative ideation more generally. We hypothesize that we can help enhance our students’ divergent thinking and creative processing outcomes by investigating the impacts of carefully selected methods and tools enabled by developments in the robust analysis of engineering ideation performance, and neurocognitive responses to creativity. In this paper, we present an experiment using the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) technique and creative language use (funded by Core R&D Programs). More specifically, we collected ERP responses to literal, nonsense, and novel metaphorical sentences that were either referring to engineering knowledge or general knowledge, testing engineering and non-engineering students. Following Rutter et al. [1], sentences differed in verb only and had been classified in prior sentence norming studies as highly unusual and highly appropriate (novel metaphors), low unusual and highly appropriate (literal sentences), and highly unusual and low appropriate (nonsense sentences). Participants read sentences while their EEG was recorded, and after reading the sentence made judgments about its unusualness and appropriateness. The findings indicate that prior knowledge modulates novel metaphor processing at the stage of lexico–semantic access, indexed by the amplitude of N400 component. Specifically, N400 amplitudes to novel metaphorical sentences are significantly reduced and pattern with literal sentences in engineers; in nonengineers, by contrast, we observed increased N400 amplitudes to novel metaphorical sentences that pattern with anomalous sentences. This mirror effect on the N400 corroborates recent findings demonstrating a strong impact of prior experience and expertise on meaning ambiguity resolution, which may in turn have implications for creative cognition

Reliability-Informed Life-Cycle Warranty Cost Analysis: A Case Study on a Transmission in Agricultural Equipment

In agricultural and industrial equipment, both new and remanufactured systems are often available for warranty coverage. In such cases, it may be challenging for equipment manufacturers to properly trade-off between the system reliability and the cost associated with a replacement option (e.g., replace with a new or remanufactured system). To address this problem, we present a reliability-informed life-cycle warranty cost (LCWC) analysis framework that enables equipment manufacturers to evaluate different warranty policies. These warranty policies differ in whether a new or remanufactured system is used for replacement in the case of product failure. The novelty of this LCWC analysis framework lies in its ability to incorporate real-world field reliability data into warranty policy assessment using probabilistic warranty cost models that consider multiple life cycles. First, the reliability functions for the new and remanufactured systems are built as the time-to-failure distributions that provide the best-fit to the field reliability data. Then, these reliability functions and their corresponding warranty policies are used to build the LCWC models according to the specific warranty terms. Finally, Monte Carlo simulation is used to propagate the time-to-failure uncertainty of each system, modeled by its reliability function, through each LCWC model to produce a probability distribution of the LCWC. The effectiveness of the proposed reliability-informed LCWC analysis framework is demonstrated with a real-world case study on a transmission used in some agricultural equipment

Mitigating design fixation effects in engineering design through product dissection activities

Design fixation plays an important role in design idea generation, and has been found to be complex in its definition and implications. Iden-tifying the factors that influence fixation is crucial in understanding how to improve design pedagogy and mitigate fixation effects. One way to potentially mitigate fixation is through product dissection activ-ities as this activity has been shown to increase creativity and design exploration in engineering design. However, since product dissection has not been studied in terms of design fixation, it is unclear if, or how, this type of activity influences fixation. In addition, although prior work studied product dissection in a team environment, it did not study how individual factors such as personality attributes influence one’s involvement, or exposure to the dissection. This is an important factor to study in order to understand how team-based dissection ac-tivities influence design fixation because the participation of each team member can be affected by factors such as personality traits. Therefore, this study explores the interaction between product dissec-tion, personality traits, and design fixation in an engineering design class setting. It was found that design fixation was indeed impacted by extraversion and conscientiousness personality traits when adjusting for semester standing and exposure to the dissection activity. These findings implicate personality in the product dissection activity, as well as suggest product dissection as a way to mitigate design fixation. By understanding these interactions, the overall design process can be enhanced, as well as our understanding of design cognition

An Evaluation Framework for Engineering Design Projects for Gender Bias, Domain Relatedness, and Ambiguity: Development

Engineering design learning is one of the key components for an engineering degree; thus engineering design projects are commonly included in engineering curricula to help students cultivate design thinking and creative problem-solving skills. However, an engineering design project is prone to the following issues if it is not appropriately provided to engineering students. First, gender bias can occur when the design project is perceived to be more skewed to one gender in comparison to the other. Second, domain bias can occur when the discipline of the design project is not related to the chosen major and interest areas of a student. Third, ambiguity can arise from the lack of clarity on design objectives and the scope. These issues can lead to diminished engagement and self-efficacy for engineering students. In order to tackle these issues, this study performs a preliminary work to build a framework that appropriately assesses engineering design projects. The evaluation framework is based on a measurement system that helps educators to evaluate the appropriateness of the design projects through designated questionnaires. The framework for design projects proposed in this study would help engineering educators to better prepare and revise their design projects, so that the engineering design projects can improve student engagement and learning performance