Transformation of Retail Shopping Preferences Among the Customers of Sylhet City: A Survey Study

The introduction of retail chain stores in Sylhet has offered a new type of shopping experience for the customers of Sylhet city. The structured system of shopping in these stores has been quite different from the traditional ‘Bazaar’ based one in terms of shopping environment, customer involvement, available choices, pricing and mostly customer value. The study examined the perceived difference in shopping experience among the customers of chain stores in Sylhet city through survey. The aim of the study is to identify the underlying reasons behind the transformation of retail shopping preferences among these customers which is causing them to choose chain stores over the traditional markets for shopping. The study also suggest for some strategies to attract and retain customers to the chain stores on the context of locality and customer expectations. Keywords: Retail shopping, Transformation, Preference, Retail chain stores

Virtual prototyping for fashion 4.0

Virtual prototyping shows enormous potential to make the fashion manufacturing industry greener and leaner. Yet the technology is not well embraced by the industry. No matter what the reason is, this is the only way towards e-manufacturing for fashion 4.0. This paper provides an overview of the technology and its features

Development and characterisation of multilayer jute fabric reinforced HDPE composites

The bast fibres, a subgroup of natural fibre family, have emerged as a strong competitor of widely used man-made glass fibre for use as fillers or reinforcing materials in certain types of composite materials, which do not require very high mechanical resistance. This paper investigates manufacturing of multi-layered jute fabric reinforced thermoplastic composite and its mechanical performance. Hessian jute fabrics in 2, 4 and 6 layers without any pre-treatment were sandwiched in 0° orientation into seven layers of High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) sheets and pressed at high temperature and pressure to form composite laminates having three different structural designs. The laminates with 2, 4 and 6 layers contain approximately 6.70 wt%, 12.90 wt%, and 18.50 wt% of jute fibres respectively. Mechanical performance of the composite laminates having 4 and 6 layers of jute fabric was found to have improved significantly when compared to the pure HDPE laminates. Within a given sample thickness of 6.5 mm, the laminate with 6-layers of jute fabric exhibited the best mechanical performance. Optical microscopic analysis revealed that the yarn orientation of the fabrics within the composites remained stable and there was no visible void in the laminate structure. Fracture morphology of the composite investigated by a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) showed good adhesion of the jute fabrics with the HDPE matrix

Review on Smart Electro-Clothing Systems (SeCSs)

This review paper presents an overview of the smart electro-clothing systems (SeCSs) targeted at health monitoring, sports benefits, fitness tracking, and social activities. Technical features of the available SeCSs, covering both textile and electronic components, are thoroughly discussed and their applications in the industry and research purposes are highlighted. In addition, it also presents the developments in the associated areas of wearable sensor systems and textile-based dry sensors. As became evident during the literature research, such a review on SeCSs covering all relevant issues has not been presented before. This paper will be particularly helpful for new generation researchers who are and will be investigating the design, development, function, and comforts of the sensor integrated clothing materials

Smart Clothing Framework for Health Monitoring Applications

Wearable technologies are making a significant impact on people’s way of living thanks to the advancements in mobile communication, internet of things (IoT), big data and artificial intelligence. Conventional wearable technologies present many challenges for the continuous monitoring of human health conditions due to their lack of flexibility and bulkiness in size. Recent development in e-textiles and the smart integration of miniature electronic devices into textiles have led to the emergence of smart clothing systems for remote health monitoring. A novel comprehensive framework of smart clothing systems for health monitoring is proposed in this paper. This framework provides design specifications, suitable sensors and textile materials for smart clothing (e.g., leggings) development. In addition, the proposed framework identifies techniques for empowering the seamless integration of sensors into textiles and suggests a development strategy for health diagnosis and prognosis through data collection, data processing and decision making. The conceptual technical specification of smart clothing is also formulated and presented. The detailed development of this framework is presented in this paper with selected examples. The key challenges in popularizing smart clothing and opportunities of future development in diverse application areas such as healthcare, sports and athletics and fashion are discussed

Sustainable adsorbents from plant-derived agricultural wastes for anionic dye removal: a review

The extensive use of dyes in numerous industries results in massive dye discharge in the wastewater, which is a major cause of water pollution. Globally, the consumption of dyes is near seven hundred thousand tons across different sectors, of which around 10–15% goes into the wastewater. Among the dye kinds, anionic dyes make up the main proportion, having a 32–90% share in the wastewater. Different plant-derived wastes, which are sustainable given their natural abundance, effectiveness, and low cost, are frequently proposed for dye separation. However, these adsorbents are inherently more suitable for cationic dyes than anionic dyes. In recent years, the modification of these wastes has been progressively considered to suit them to anionic dye removal. These modifications involve mechanical, thermal, or chemical treatments, or combinations. These attempts propose two-way benefits, as one abundant waste is being used to cure another severe problem, and eventually both could be diminished. This review has a key focus on the evaluation of plant-derived adsorbents and their modifications, and particularly for anionic dye adsorption. Overall, the mechanism of adsorption and the suitability of the current methods are discussed, and their future potential is explored

Design of a compact planar transmission line for miniaturized rat-race coupler with harmonics suppression

This paper presents an elegant yet straightforward design procedure for a compact rat-race coupler (RRC) with an extended harmonic suppression. The coupler’s conventional λ /4 transmission lines (TLs) are replaced by a specialized TL that offers significant size reduction and harmonic elimination capabilities in the proposed approach. The design procedure is verified through the theoretical, circuit, and electromagnetic (EM) analyses, showing excellent agreement among different analyses and the measured results. The circuit and EM results show that the proposed TL replicates the same frequency behaviour of the conventional one at the design frequency of 1.8 GHz while enables harmonic suppression up to the 7th harmonic and a size reduction of 74%. According to the measured results, the RRC has a fractional bandwidth of 20%, with input insertion losses of around 0.2 dB and isolation level better than 35 dB. Furthermore, the total footprint of the proposed RRC is only 31.7 mm ×15.9 mm, corresponding to 0.28λ×0.14λ , where λ is the guided wavelength at 1.8 GHz.This work was supported in part by the Icelandic Centre for Research (RANNIS) Grant 206606051, and in part by the National Science Centre of Poland Grant 2017/37/B/ST7/00563

Current development and future perspective on natural jute fibers and their biocomposites

The increasing trend of the use of synthetic products may result in an increased level of pollution affecting both the environment and living organisms. Therefore, from the sustainability point of view, natural, renewable and biodegradable materials are urgently needed to replace environmentally harmful synthetic materials. Jute, one of the natural fibers, plays a vital role in developing composite materials that showed potential in a variety of applications such as household, automotive and medical appliances. This paper first reviews the characterization and performance of jute fibers. Subsequently, the main focus is shifted towards research advancements in enhancing physical, mechanical, thermal and tribological properties of the polymeric materials (i.e., synthetic or biobased and thermoplastic or thermoset plastic) reinforced with jute fibers in a variety of forms such as particle, short fiber or woven fabric. It is understood that the physio-mechanical properties of jute-polymer composites largely vary based on the fiber processing and treatment, fiber shape and/or size, fabrication processes, fiber volume fraction, layering sequence within the matrix, interaction of the fiber with the matrix and the matrix materials used. Furthermore, the emerging research on jute fiber, such as nanomaterials from jute, bioplastic packaging, heavy metal absorption, electronics, energy device or medical applications and development of jute fiber composites with 3D printing, is explored. Finally, the key challenges for jute and its derivative products in gaining commercial successes have been highlighted and potential future directions are discussed