Search results

Periods spent in various industries are essential in all applied science courses, and enable the student to keep his academic studies, especially experimentation, in perspective. The type of sandwich course consisting of six‐monthly periods spent alternately in college and industry for three years followed by a final year completely in college provides the wisest combination of industrial training and academic studies. This sandwich course is a headache for administrators but offers the students a very wide range of experience; the scheme also permits two end‐on streams per year to be accommodated by our universities, so enabling existing academic facilities to be used more efficiently, as well as producing an even demand on industrial training facilities (Probert, 1964).

Applied physics and engineering are essentially experimental philosophies, and so an appreciation of techniques is fundamental to their understanding. However, academic tradition is biased so heavily in favour of pure thought that the experimentalist is usually regarded as intellectually inferior to, rather than complementary with, the theoretician. Even some engineering teachers contribute to this snobbery by pretending that they are pure scientists (so alleges Thring 1965). However, there is the converse opinion: frequently the required knowledge does not exist when the technologist has to make a decision, and so in some respects he feels superior to the pure scientist.

Innovation is an increasingly distributed process, involving networks of geographically dispersed players with a variety of possible, and dynamic, value chain configurations (Fraser, Minshall, & Probert, 2005). ‘Open innovation’ is one term that has emerged to describe ‘[…] the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively’ (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2006). This is contrasted with the ‘closed’ model of innovation where firms typically generate their own ideas which they then develop, produce, market, distribute and support.

The requirements imposed upon advanced short take‐off and vertical landing (ASTOVL) aircraft give rise to challenging demands on their propulsion systems. One possible approach is to have a high‐performance turbofan of traditional design and an additional, but separate, fan to provide a major part of the lift during the take‐off and landing manoeuvres. For such a design, there are several quite‐different choices of layout for providing the power to drive the remote fan by means of the core engine. These include shaft‐driven and bleed‐driven options. The choice will depend on the anatomy and required thermodynamic‐performance of the whole system. In this paper, several pertinent alternative engine‐designs are discussed. Four of these, based on a high‐performance low‐bypass‐ratio core engine, are studied in detail and their behaviours compared. Prima facie, the preferred choice is the engine with the shaft‐driven fan. A slightly less acceptable choice is the high‐pressure turbine exit‐bleed driven remote‐fan.

As mentioned at the conclusion of the first part of this article last month, the first fortnight a student spends at college is devoted entirely to an induction course about experimental methods. The syllabus is given below: it is only an introduction, of course, since later laboratory work develops the theme and provides examples of the problems discussed.

The effective management of technology as a source of competitive advantage is of vital importance for many organisations. It is necessary to understand, communicate and integrate technology strategy with marketing, financial, operations and human resource strategies. This is of particular importance when one considers the increasing cost, pace and complexity of technology developments, combined with shortening product life cycles. A five‐process model provides a framework within which technology management activities can be understood: identification, selection, acquisition, exploitation and protection. Based on this model, a technology management assessment procedure has been developed, using an “action research” approach. This paper presents an industrial case study describing the first full application of the procedure within a high‐volume manufacturing business. The impact of applying the procedure is assessed in terms of benefits to the participating business, together with improvements to the assessment procedure itself, in the context of the action research framework.

This study aims to carry out numerical modeling to predict aerodynamic noise radiation from four different Savonius rotor blade profile.

Incompressible unsteady reynolds-averaged navier-stokes (URANS) approach using gamma–theta turbulence model is conducted to obtain the time accurate turbulent flow field. The Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings (FW-H) acoustic analogy formulation is used for noise predictions at optimal tip speed ratio (TSR).

The mean torque and power coefficients are compared with the experimental data and acceptable agreement is observed. The total and Mono+Dipole noise graphs are presented. A discrete tonal component at low frequencies in all graphs is attributed to the blade passing frequency at the given TSR. According to the noise prediction results, Bach type rotor has the lowest level of noise emission. The effect of TSR on the noise level from the Bach rotor is investigated. A direct relation between angular velocity and the noise emission is found.

The savonius rotor is a type of vertical axis wind turbines suited for mounting in the vicinity of residential areas. Also, wind turbines wherein operation are efficient sources of tonal and broadband noises and affect the inhabitable environment adversely. Therefore, the acoustic pollution assessment is essential for the installation of wind turbines in residential areas.

This study aims to investigate the radiated noise level of four common Savonius rotor blade profiles, namely, Bach type, Benesh type, semi-elliptic and conventional. As stated above, numbers of studies exploit the URANS method coupled with the FW-H analogy to predict the aeroacoustics behavior of wind turbines. Therefore, this approach is chosen in this research to deal with the aeroacoustics and aerodynamic calculation of the flow field around the aforementioned Savonius blade profiles. The effect of optimal TSR on the emitted noise and the contribution of thickness, loading and quadrupole sources are of interest in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how supply and demand interact during industrial emergence.

The paper builds on previous theorising about co-evolutionary dynamics, exploring the interaction between supply and demand in a study of the industrial emergence of the commercial inkjet cluster in Cambridge, UK. Data are collected through 13 interviews with professionals working in the industry.

The paper shows that as new industries emerge, asynchronies between technology supply and market demand create opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. In attempting to match innovative technologies to particular applications, entrepreneurs adapt to the system conditions and shape the environment to their own advantage. Firms that successfully operate in emerging industries demonstrate the functionality of new technologies, reducing uncertainty and increasing customer receptiveness.

The research is geographically bounded to the Cambridge commercial inkjet cluster. Further studies could consider commercial inkjet from a global perspective or test the applicability of the findings in other industries.

Technology-based firms are often innovating during periods of industrial emergence. The insights developed in this paper help such firms recognise the emerging context in which they operate and the challenges that need to overcome.

As an in depth study of a single industry, this research responds to calls for studies into industrial emergence, providing insights into how supply and demand interact during this phase of the industry lifecycle.

The purpose of this paper is to radically redesign the methodology of plant maintenance and develop a three phase framework. A framework for effective and continuous maintenance improvement is presented.

The first phase determines the key performance area, the second phase makes decision about the appropriate policy selection and third phase aims to generate capability in an organization to compete at world level. A case is presented here, of the implementation of a “maintenance reengineering framework”, developed with the aid of certain maintenance components.

The maintenance reengineering framework, when implemented, proved successful with a more than 90 per cent rise in production rate.

The paper contributes some guidelines which can be helpful in making decision about the selection of maintenance policy and for the achievement of world‐class effectiveness.

Maintenance reengineering (MR) framework includes the core concepts of preventive maintenance practices, total maintenance management and system perspectives of maintenance. Its implementation goes through three phases from identification of key performance area, via suitable maintenance policy selection to generating the capability for world‐class effectiveness. The experience of this pilot implementation in a cement company in India suggested the feasibility of this framework in elevating the performance of maintenance management.

This article offers a framework that addresses research on maintenance reengineering. It attempts to establish a relationship among the components of maintenance, which can bring potential benefits to the corporations of similar operations and nature.

In hot and dry climates, air conditioning accounts for a large portion of total energy consumption; therefore, this paper aims to investigate the impact of sol-air temperature and ground temperature on the loss of cooling energy in hot and dry regions of Iran.

In line with this objective, the values of sol-air temperature along different directions and ground temperature at different depths were assessed with respect to climatic data of Yazd City. The impact of sol-air temperature and ground temperature on the rate of heat loss was investigated. So, energy loss of the walls aligned to four primary directions was calculated. This process was repeated for a 36 m² building with three different shape factors. All analyses were conducted for the period from May to September, during which buildings need to be cooled by air conditioners.

Numerical analyses conducted for hot and dry climate show that sol-air temperature leads to a 41-17 per cent increase in the wall’s energy loss compared with ambient temperature. Meanwhile, building the wall below the surface leads to a significant reduction in energy loss. For example, building the wall 400 cm below the surface leads to about 74.8-79.2 per cent energy saving compared with above ground design. The results also show that increasing the direct contact between soil and building envelope decreases the energy loss, so energy loss of a building that is built 400 cm below the surface is 53.7-55.3 per cent lower than that of a building built above the surface.

The impact of sol-air temperature and ground temperature on the cooling energy loss of a building in hot and dry climate was investigated. Numerical analysis shows that solar radiation increases heat loss from building envelope. Soil temperature fluctuations decrease with depth. Heat loss from building envelope in an underground building is lower than that from building envelope in a building built above the ground. Three different shape factors showed that sol-air temperature has the maximum impact on square-shaped plan and minimal impact on buildings with east-west orientation.