Nini Xia, Sichao Ding, Tao Ling and Yuchun Tang
Safety climate plays an important role in the high-risk construction industry. Advances have been made in the understanding of construction safety climate in terms of four…
Abstract
Purpose
Safety climate plays an important role in the high-risk construction industry. Advances have been made in the understanding of construction safety climate in terms of four interrelated themes, specifically, its definition, measurement, antecedents and consequences. However, knowledge remains fragmented as the studies are scattered, and a systematic review covering these four themes is lacking. To address this research gap, this study aims to perform a systematic literature review of construction safety climate literature regarding the four themes.
Design/methodology/approach
Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol guidelines, 178 eligible articles were obtained. This study provided thematic analysis of the 178 papers to identify what is known and what is not yet fully known regarding the four themes of construction safety climate. This study also conducted a descriptive analysis to identify the influential scholars, keywords, theories and research methods used by the literature, and finally presented an integrative framework directing future research.
Findings
The literature has not reached a consensus on the definition and measurement of construction safety climate. While it has identified the impact of safety climate on both behavioral and accident consequences, it has paid less attention to the antecedents and their underlying mechanisms regarding safety climate. Fang D. and Lingard H. are identified as the most influential authors in this field. “Questionnaire” and “safety behavior” are the keywords most closely related to safety climate. Unfortunately, the existing evidence for the causal relationships between safety climate and its antecedents and consequences is weak, as many studies lack clear theoretical substance, use a concurrent research design and focus only on individual-level climate perceptions. Finally, to support the development of construction safety climate around the four themes, potential research directions and research methods supporting them are illustrated.
Originality/value
This review makes contributions by integrating existing construction studies covering its definition, measurement, antecedents and consequences. This review also makes contributions to specific themes: no review exists on the antecedents of construction safety climate, and this review fills that gap; with regard to consequences, the existing reviews focus either on safety outcomes or safety behavior, but this review included both of them and further elaborated the different theories underpinning the relationships between safety climate and them. It is hoped that this systematic review will be helpful to the research community toward developing a nomologic network and promoting knowledge integration with respect to construction safety climate.
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Xingwen Wu, Zhenxian Zhang, Wubin Cai, Ningrui Yang, Xuesong Jin, Ping Wang, Zefeng Wen, Maoru Chi, Shuling Liang and Yunhua Huang
This review aims to give a critical view of the wheel/rail high frequency vibration-induced vibration fatigue in railway bogie.
Abstract
Purpose
This review aims to give a critical view of the wheel/rail high frequency vibration-induced vibration fatigue in railway bogie.
Design/methodology/approach
Vibration fatigue of railway bogie arising from the wheel/rail high frequency vibration has become the main concern of railway operators. Previous reviews usually focused on the formation mechanism of wheel/rail high frequency vibration. This paper thus gives a critical review of the vibration fatigue of railway bogie owing to the short-pitch irregularities-induced high frequency vibration, including a brief introduction of short-pitch irregularities, associated high frequency vibration in railway bogie, typical vibration fatigue failure cases of railway bogie and methodologies used for the assessment of vibration fatigue and research gaps.
Findings
The results showed that the resulting excitation frequencies of short-pitch irregularity vary substantially due to different track types and formation mechanisms. The axle box-mounted components are much more vulnerable to vibration fatigue compared with other components. The wheel polygonal wear and rail corrugation-induced high frequency vibration is the main driving force of fatigue failure, and the fatigue crack usually initiates from the defect of the weld seam. Vibration spectrum for attachments of railway bogie defined in the standard underestimates the vibration level arising from the short-pitch irregularities. The current investigations on vibration fatigue mainly focus on the methods to improve the accuracy of fatigue damage assessment, and a systematical design method for vibration fatigue remains a huge gap to improve the survival probability when the rail vehicle is subjected to vibration fatigue.
Originality/value
The research can facilitate the development of a new methodology to improve the fatigue life of railway vehicles when subjected to wheel/rail high frequency vibration.
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Jelena Stankevičienė and Dovilė Valtoraitė
Purpose: This chapter identifies performance factors that have the strongest impact on companies’ sustainable outcomes and compares the obtained results across different sectors…
Abstract
Purpose: This chapter identifies performance factors that have the strongest impact on companies’ sustainable outcomes and compares the obtained results across different sectors.
Methodology: About 3,384 observations were gathered from 2015 to 2022 from companies in communication services, energy, financials, real estate, and utilities sectors that comprise the ‘STOXX Global ESG Leaders Select 50’ index. The multiple regression model is constructed with companies’ ESG scores as dependent variables and independent variables representing operational, financial, and market performance.
Findings: Companies that tend to have higher operational and financial performance in the financial sector are more likely to have higher ESG performance. The financial performance results of companies showed the strongest statistically significant relationship with environmental and the weakest with governance scores.
Implications: Results benefit private and institutional investors aiming to create more sustainable portfolios. The obtained results indicate that these investors should focus on companies operating in the financial and energy sectors with higher performance results. Better ROE, ROA, and Tobin’s Q may have a negative impact on sustainable outcomes for companies operating in the real estate and utility sectors.
Limitations: Firstly, not all ESG index providers disclose information about their index constituents. Secondly, within the chosen ‘STOXX Global ESG Leaders Select 50’ index, not all constituents had complete ESG data available on the Bloomberg platform. When selecting the analysis period, it was observed that the accessible ESG data on Bloomberg covers a relatively short time span, only from 2015 onwards.
Future research: A larger number of companies by choosing a more comprehensive available ESG index.
Shuai Yang, Bin Wang, Junyuan Tao, Zhe Ruan and Hong Liu
The 6D pose estimation is a crucial branch of robot vision. However, the authors find that due to the failure to make full use of the complementarity of the appearance and…
Abstract
Purpose
The 6D pose estimation is a crucial branch of robot vision. However, the authors find that due to the failure to make full use of the complementarity of the appearance and geometry information of the object, the failure to deeply explore the contributions of the features from different regions to the pose estimation, and the failure to take advantage of the invariance of the geometric structure of keypoints, the performances of the most existing methods are not satisfactory. This paper aims to design a high-precision 6D pose estimation method based on above insights.
Design/methodology/approach
First, a multi-scale cross-attention-based feature fusion module (MCFF) is designed to aggregate the appearance and geometry information by exploring the correlations between appearance features and geometry features in the various regions. Second, the authors build a multi-query regional-attention-based feature differentiation module (MRFD) to learn the contribution of each region to each keypoint. Finally, a geometric enhancement mechanism (GEM) is designed to use structure information to predict keypoints and optimize both pose and keypoints in the inference phase.
Findings
Experiments on several benchmarks and real robot show that the proposed method performs better than existing methods. Ablation studies illustrate the effectiveness of each module of the authors’ method.
Originality/value
A high-precision 6D pose estimation method is proposed by studying the relationship between the appearance and geometry from different object parts and the geometric invariance of the keypoints, which is of great significance for various robot applications.
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Xu Yang, Xin Yue, Zhenhua Cai and Shengshi Zhong
This paper aims to present a set of processes for obtaining the global spraying trajectory of a cold spraying robot on a complex surface.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to present a set of processes for obtaining the global spraying trajectory of a cold spraying robot on a complex surface.
Design/methodology/approach
The complex workpiece surfaces in the project are first divided by triangular meshing. Then, the geodesic curve method is applied for local path planning. Finally, the subsurface trajectory combination optimization problem is modeled as a GTSP problem and solved by the ant colony algorithm, where the evaluation scores and the uniform design method are used to determine the optimal parameter combination of the algorithm. A global optimized spraying trajectory is thus obtained.
Findings
The simulation results show that the proposed processes can achieve the shortest global spraying trajectory. Moreover, the cold spraying experiment on the IRB4600 six-joint robot verifies that the spraying trajectory obtained by the processes can ensure a uniform coating thickness.
Originality/value
The proposed processes address the issue of different parameter combinations, leading to different results when using the ant colony algorithm. The two methods for obtaining the optimal parameter combinations can solve this problem quickly and effectively, and guarantee that the processes obtain the optimal global spraying trajectory.
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Tian-Yu Wu, Jianfei Zhang, Yanjun Dai, Tao-Feng Cao, Kong Ling and Wen-Quan Tao
To present the detailed implementation processes of the IDEAL algorithm for two-dimensional compressible flows based on Delaunay triangular mesh, and compare the performance of…
Abstract
Purpose
To present the detailed implementation processes of the IDEAL algorithm for two-dimensional compressible flows based on Delaunay triangular mesh, and compare the performance of the SIMPLE and IDEAL algorithms for solving compressible problems. What’s more, the implementation processes of Delaunay mesh generation and derivation of the pressure correction equation are also introduced.
Design/methodology/approach
Programming completely in C++.
Findings
Five compressible examples are used to test the SIMPLE and IDEAL algorithms, and the comparison with measurement data shows good agreement. The IDEAL algorithm has much better performance in both convergence rate and stability over the SIMPLE algorithm.
Originality/value
The detail solution procedure of implementing the IDEAL algorithm for compressible flows based on Delaunay triangular mesh is presented in this work, seemingly first in the literature.
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Lin Chen, Shan Ling, Tao Chen, Yukang Cai and Haihong Pan
This paper aims to investigate the suppression of end-point vibrations in industrial robot systems that exhibit joint flexibility and are subject to external disturbances.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the suppression of end-point vibrations in industrial robot systems that exhibit joint flexibility and are subject to external disturbances.
Design/methodology/approach
The real-time position tracking error is effectively decomposed by using feedforward control based on a dynamic model. Various proportional-derivative controllers and adapted versions are used to compute real-time compensation torque for different position tracking errors. This approach aims to simultaneously achieve rapid response and stability in the control system, resulting in reduced end vibration in the industrial robot.
Findings
Experiments were conducted in torque compensation on a 6R industrial robot platform. Compared to the dynamic model calculate torque feedforward compensation method, the maximum reduction of the root mean square of the position error of each joint reached 77% and the minimum reduction was 36.2%. This enhancement improves the trajectory tracking accuracy and effectively suppresses the end-effector vibration.
Originality/value
An improved torque feedforward compensation method is proposed and verified. According to the experimental results, the method can effectively suppress vibration and further improve the trajectory tracking accuracy.
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Shiang-Wuu Perng, Horng Wen Wu, Yi-Ling Guo and Tao-Hsuan Liu
The purpose of this study is to value the thermal and hydraulic transport augmentation of turbulent fluid flow within the round-pipe axis fixed by a twisted-staggered…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to value the thermal and hydraulic transport augmentation of turbulent fluid flow within the round-pipe axis fixed by a twisted-staggered concave/convex dimples tape.
Design/methodology/approach
This study meets the report’s novel design by axis-inserting a twisted plastic tape with staggered concave/convex dimples of varying diameters (4 and 6 mm) and depths (1, 1.4 and 1.8 mm). Introducing a realizable model integrated with an improved wall function and SIMPLE solving procedure evaluates the thermo-hydraulic transport as Reynolds number is feasible as 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 and 20,000. In addition, using the findings from the present experimental work validates the numerical methodology.
Findings
This paper reveals that the staggered concave/convex dimples on the axis-fixed plastic tape can significantly improve thermo-hydraulic transport within this outer-heated tube. Furthermore, the processed dimples can cause flow disturbance, which increases turbulent kinetic energy and accelerates fluid mixing around a twisted plastic tape, resulting in enhanced thermal convection. The six kinds of twisted tapes (C1−C6) result in the thermo-hydraulic performance index (η) of 1.18–1.32 at Re = 5000. Among all the cases, the dimples using 4 mm combined with 6 mm diameter and 1.4 mm height (C4) earn the highest, around 1.40 at Re = 5,000.
Research limitations/implications
The conditions of constant hydraulic-thermal characteristics of working fluid (air), steady Newtonian fluid considered, and the ignored radiative heat transfer and gravity are the research limitations of the numerical simulation.
Practical implications
The given results can benefit from a round tube design of a thermal apparatus axis fixed by a twisted-staggered concave/convex dimples tape to augment the thermo-hydraulic transport.
Originality/value
Staggered concave/convex dimples on the surface of a twisted tape allow for impinging and swirling flow along the tape. These processed dimples can induce flow disturbance, which increases the turbulent kinetic energy and facilitates fluid mixing in a twisted tape. Furthermore, the hybrid-diameter dimples have enough flow channels for fluid separation-reattachment, and the thermo-hydraulic performance index has improved. This paper then presents a helpful passive approach for cooling a thermal device.
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Mukesh Kondala, Sai Sudhakar Nudurupati and Raja Phani Pappu
The circular economy (CE) represents an industry-wide transition from linear to circular processes. There has been a proliferation of literature on CE in the last decade. However…
Abstract
Purpose
The circular economy (CE) represents an industry-wide transition from linear to circular processes. There has been a proliferation of literature on CE in the last decade. However, the existing studies on the adaption of CE in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are scarce. This study aims to develop a research agenda and the way forward for future researchers focusing on the adoption of CE.
Design/methodology/approach
This article analyses the CE concepts through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Coding and content analysis are performed to generate emergent themes with the help of “Atlas.ti” software.
Findings
The authors uncovered the contemporary significance of adopting CE and the state-of-the-art literature on CE. The study's findings fall into four broad themes: Technical know-how, resource and process optimization, reverse practices and technology and innovation. Ten thought-provoking questions were identified in the four themes that researchers can explore further in embracing CE to achieve sustainability in SMEs.
Practical implications
The study has highlighted the importance of CE adoption and CE's benefits to stakeholders across all three dimensions, i.e. social, economic and ecological. Practitioners can use the agenda in four themes to strengthen the practitioners' existing practices in SMEs to promote CE.
Originality/value
The study's uniqueness is the supply of current knowledge from diverse literature and practical consequences for SMEs. This study opens new lines of inquiry to adopt CE in SMEs, streamlining the existing literature into four themes to focus future research.
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Shuaikang Hao, Lifang Peng, Xinyin Tang and Ling Huang
This study introduces a new type of platform recommendation about mutual funds and draws on the signaling theory to conduct a quasi-experimental design to investigate how the…
Abstract
Purpose
This study introduces a new type of platform recommendation about mutual funds and draws on the signaling theory to conduct a quasi-experimental design to investigate how the platform recommendation influences investors’ investment decisions. Moreover, the authors examine the combined effect of star ratings and the platform recommendation on fund flow and test the investment value of recommended funds.
Design/methodology/approach
This study implements a quasi-experimental design based on 1,295 mutual funds traded on Alipay’s online platform to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The empirical results show that the recommended funds received higher fund flows from investors when the platform recommendation was established. Moreover, a substitution effect between tag recommendation and star ratings on fund flow was identified. We also uncovered that investing in platform-recommended funds can yield significant and higher fund returns for investors than those without platform recommendations.
Originality/value
Our findings shed new insights into the role of platform recommendations in helping fund investors make investment decisions and contribute to the business of online mutual fund transactions by investigating the effect of platform recommendations on fund flow and performance.