Development and Validation of NDE Standards for NASAs Advanced Composites Project

The adoption of composite materials in aircraft manufacturing for use in structural applications continues to increase but is still relatively new to the industry. Composite components have large development and certification costs in comparison to metallic structures. Traditional methods of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) used for isotropic materials such as metals may not be adequate for composite applications and therefore is a contributing factor to the cost and complexity of developing new structural composites. Additionally, the defects of interest in composite materials are significantly different from metals. Thus, good quality composite reference standards are essential to obtaining reliable and quantifiable NDE results. Ideally, reference standards contain flaws or damage whose NDE indications most closely represent those created by actual flaws/damage. They should also be easy to duplicate and inexpensive to manufacture. NASAs Advanced Composites Project, working with industry partners, developed a set of composite standards that contain a range of validated defects representing those typically found in aerospace composite materials. This paper will provide an overview of the standards fabricated, the manufacturing plans used to fabricate them, the types of defects included, and validation testing that has performed. Also discussed is an inter-laboratory round-robin test that is being performed on these standards. The paper will describe a guidance document being compiled to outline relevant inspection procedures for challenging and critical defects unique to composites where conventional techniques may not be appropriate

Ecological imaginaries : organising sustainability

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Business.This thesis investigates organisational enactment of sustainability. The problematic addressed is that despite strong evidence supporting human induced global ecological damage, organisational practices remain unchanged and continue to degrade ecological systems. The question addressed is what factors contribute to the inertia that inhibits change for ecological sustainability in organisations? The question is addressed from the perspectives of individuals who are stakeholders in organisations. The modern concept of sustainability arose during the 1970s and selected aspects of sustainability discourses, for example the concept of the triple bottom line (TBL), have since been integrated into the organising narratives of organisation and society. Despite such success, indicators such as human induced climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequalities between rich and poor, suggest that mainstream institutions have not taken up change for sustainability. The proposition of this thesis is that alteration to our social imaginary (ies) is a necessary precursor to enactment of sustainability. The thesis presents findings from three case studies: Landcare, Corcon and Carepoint. These organisations were selected because they represented different sectors and each had initiated a formal sustainability change project: Corcon is an engineering organisation, Carepoint a community services not-for-profit organisation and Landcare an agricultural organisation. Landcare highlights the dialogue that nature has with individuals and organisations and how recognising this dialogue can lead to ecological solutions for sustainability. The Corcon case contributes the importance of boundaries defining inclusion and exclusion as moral constraints and enablers to developing sustainability solutions and the Carepoint case demonstrates that the multiplicity of competing sustainability discourses are understood by individuals who then make decisions based on the context of the dominant imaginary within which they are situated. These findings from the research highlight barriers concerned with meaning construction that view nature as an excluded other. I argue that the adoption of ecological sustainability by organisations and society needs new narratives to facilitate the emergence of meanings of ecological sustainability conducive to the inclusion of nature. The synthesis of these findings presents two possibilities for stimulating the creation of meaning construction that would facilitate an inclusive approach to nature. The first possibility is the Australian Aboriginal concept of Country, which offers a new source of logics upon which the development of a new socio-political sustainability imaginary may draw. The second possibility argues for the need to create a new social imaginary to support ecological sustainability. A contribution of this thesis is to provide the alternative frame of metabolic organisation to extant models of weak and strong sustainability to stimulate the creation of new ecological imaginaries. Metabolic organisation is defined as a systemic framework comprising three interdependent concepts: metabolism, values and enmeshment, and brings together three distinct strands of theory: social and biological metabolism, value theory and ecological theories

The Role of the Rho-Associated Coiled-Coil Containing Kinase (ROCK) in Cytokine-Induced Chemokine Responses in Intestinal Epithelial Cells

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) affects over 1 million Americans and can cause severe tissue damage and even death. TNF-α is a pro-inflammatory cytokine that is elevated in IBD and plays a central role in inflammation. Previous results in our laboratory showed that another cytokine, IL-1β, induces chemokine expression in intestinal epithelial cells (IEC), which is mediated by Rho-associated kinase (ROCK). Because ROCK may be an important mediator of inflammation, we extended our investigations to examine the role of ROCK in TNF-α-stimulated chemokine responses in IEC. Inhibiting ROCK with the Y-27632 compound resulted in a significant, but incomplete, suppression of TNF-α-induced CXCL8 expression in Caco-2 cells, indicating that ROCK is required for optimal CXCL8 production in IEC. ROCK inhibition also blocked TNF-α-stimulated JNK phosphorylation in Caco-2 cells but did not affect NF-κB activation, suggesting an explanation for the partial suppression of CXCL8, as CXCL8 is under the control of both NF-κB and the JNK-activated AP-1 transcription factor. Unlike CXCL8, the production of TNF-α-induced CCL2 and CCL20 expression was enhanced by ROCK inhibition in Caco-2 cells, indicating that ROCK activity had a suppressive effect on these responses. Further experiments showed that the ROCK-dependent suppression was likely mediated by ERK since the MEK/ERK inhibitor, PD98059, had the same enhancement effect as the ROCK inhibitor on TNF-α-induced CCL2 secretion. These results suggest that ROCK plays a complex role in chemokine production in IEC. Furthermore, since ROCK appears to control the expression of several pro-inflammatory mediators, ROCK may be a promising therapeutic target for IBD

Organising for Ecological Repair: Reconstructing Land Management Practice

© 2015, © 2015 SAGE Publications. In this article, we explore organising narratives that underpin the generation of effective ecological solutions. We examine the processes of meaning construction in relation to the development of sustainable land management practices in the Landcare organisation in Australia. Meaning construction is situated in a variety of contexts that are themselves strongly influenced by a meta-narrative, which Taylor has labelled the “modern social imaginary”: A shared system of meanings that captures the imaginations of individuals and shapes their social groupings and society. The shift in meaning construction is reflected in the emergence of a narrative of “ecological repair” that involved a process of learning and knowledge development we have labelled protracted sense-making. Our research findings have led us to conclude that the development of successful ecological solutions require an active rewriting of the social imaginary

International Competitiveness of Low-carbon Hydrogen Supply to the North-west European Market

This paper analyses which sources of low-carbon hydrogen for the Northwest European market are most competitive, taking into account costs of local production, conversion and transport. Production costs of electrolysis are strongly affected by local renewable electricity costs and capacity factors. Transport costs are the lowest by pipelines for distances under 10,000 km, with costs linearly increasing with distance. For larger distances, transport as ammonia is more efficient, with less relation to distance, despite higher conversion costs. The most competitive low-carbon hydrogen supply to the Northwest European market appears to be local Steam Methane Reforming with Carbon Capture and Storage when international gas prices return back to historical levels. When gas prices, however, remain high, then import from Morocco with electrolysis directly connected to offshore wind generation is found to be the most competitive source of low-carbon hydrogen. These conclusions are robust for various assumptions on costs and capacity factors