Towards greener horizontal-axis wind turbines: Analysis of carbon emissions, energy and costs at the early design stage

This paper describes the development of a quantitative analysis system as a platform for rapidly estimate energy, costs and carbon emission to facilitate the comparison of different wind turbine concept designs. This system aimed specifically at wind turbine manufacturing processes due to the fact that a large proportion of the environmental, costs and energy impacts would occur at this stage. The proposed method supports an initial assessment of multiple design concepts which allows the selection and development of a “greener” wind turbine. The developed system enables concept design of commercial wind turbine towers of hub heights between 44 and 135 m. The method supports an accurate estimation in regards to the dimension, energy consumed, maximum power output, costs and carbon emission in the early design phases of a wind turbine. As a result of the development, the proposed approach could potentially be used to minimise the carbon footprints of major engineering projects such as wind farms

Adoption of Open Source and conventional ERP solutions for small and medium enterprises in manufacturing

Many studies on the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market have indicated that very few ERPs have succeeded to fully meet the expectations of an organisation in particularly the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This is usually due to commercial reasons, because most of the ERP systems are primarily designed and developed for large corporations which is not suitable for simplified and rapidly changing SMEs. With the arrival of licence free open source ERPs and at an affordable price, the problem of capital shortage in SMEs is partially resolved while flexibility remains a problem. In order to solve the flexibility issue, this paper presents methods of (a) an industrial survey and (b) a multistage initiation model to compare open source ERPs and the advantages of conventional ERP’s modular structure to propose an alternative ERP platform. The finding concludes that this alternative platform is feasible to be developed by users as well as flexible enough for growing SMEs in manufacturing

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan

The discrimination of the fundamental frequency of complex tones by normally hearing children

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2005.A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2005.Also available in print.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Long term sustainable product development at the packaging sector

This paper outlines the importance of sustainable product developments and their role in securing a sustainable future through current practices and procedures. It discusses the difficulties faced within organisations through the complexities and swamping of regulations when considering sustainability and the problems in policing such a system to ensure compliance. Focus is centred on the design stage, where large numbers of standards and interests must be factored in to create specifications that are highly compliant. Where there is a limited understanding of the complexities that are presented at this stage, less optimum specifications will be dispatched. This presents the need to think strategically with new systems and approaches which adapt to company behaviour, where decisions that are made at a design stage have impacts up and down the supply chain, changes that are made must be in line with company strategic objectives and provide influential returns on investment

Cost Evaluation in Design for End-of-Life of Automotive Components

The European Union implemented the End-of-Life Vehicle directive to deal with an estimated 6 million end-of-life vehicles each year. Existing literature describe the processes to deal with the waste at end-of-life of different products but there is a lack of information on the costing of these options. These costs remain a concern to automotive manufacturers. This paper therefore reports the end-of-life costs of vehicle components and also demonstrates how these costs can be predicted at the design stage. The proposed approach should help to decide whether the automotive parts are viable for remanufacture, refurbishment, recycling, or disposal from an economic perspective. Two different automotive parts have been selected as case studies to validate the approach. Assumptions were made during the development of the technique and based on the results, the proposed approach could potentially provide vehicle manufacturers a method of estimating the cost of end-of-life recovery processes of vehicle components

A hybrid Data Quality Indicator and statistical method for improving uncertainty analysis in LCA of a small off-grid wind turbine

In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) uncertainty analysis has been recommended when choosing sustainable products. Both Data Quality Indicator and statistical methods are used to estimate data uncertainties in LCA. Neither of these alone is however adequate enough to address the challenges in LCA of a complex system due to data scarcity and large quantity of material types. This paper applies a hybrid stochastic method, combining the statistical and Data Quality Indicator methods by using a pre-screening process based on Monte Carlo rank-order correlation sensitivity analysis, to improve the uncertainty estimate in wind turbine LCA with data limitations. In the presented case study which performed the stochastic estimation of CO2 emissions, similar results from the hybrid method were observed compared to the pure Data Quality Indicator method. Summarily, the presented hybrid method can be used as a possible alternative for evaluating deterministic LCA results like CO2 emissions, when results that are more reliable are desired with limited availability of data

Development of a Quantitative Analysis System for Greener and Economically Sustainable Wind Farms

This paper reports the development of a quantitative analysis system for selecting a greener and economically sustainable wind farm at the early design stage. A single wind turbine produces a limited amount of carbon emissions throughout its lifecycle. By taking a broader view, such as wind farms, collectively such an application would have a greater impact upon the environment and cost. Recent research on wind farms tends to focus on wind flow modelling to enable accurate prediction of power generation. Therefore, this paper presents a quantitative approach to predict a wind farm’s lifetime (i) carbon emissions and intensity; (ii) potential energy production; (iii) return on investment and (iv) payback time from an early design perspective. The overall contribution of this work is to develop a quantitative approach to enable the selection of ‘greener’ designs for reducing the environmental impacts of a wind farm with hub heights between 44 m and 135 m while still considering its economic feasibility assessment. This newly developed system could potentially be used by top-management and engineers of wind turbine manufacturers and wind energy service providers for cleaner energy provision