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Faced with an increasingly open society, retail concentration and population change, the purpose of this paper is to consider the challenges and potential for small towns to compete for custom from their residents.

Retail challenges and potential are considered through exploring the attitudes and behaviour of residents in a range of towns, where the key factors affecting trade are identified using regression analysis and then explored further using more open‐ended approaches.

The resident surveys illustrate a sizeable leakage of retail expenditure out of the towns, particularly for comparison goods. Regression analysis shows that this leakage is more part of a general trend rather than being associated with high levels of migration into the towns. Residents seem to fit into two different groupings: first, those whose expectations can be met at the small town level; and second, those wanting a different offer and tending to go elsewhere. Encouraging trade from the former provides the most realistic policy objective.

Key issues relate to getting the basics right, providing support to independent/specialist shops, encouraging firms to fill missing key elements of the retail offer and, where population change is occurring, ensuring that the expansion of services does not have detrimental effects for town centres.

This paper illustrates that although there are many retail challenges‐facing small towns, there is potential for them to maintain their viability and vitality.

This paper seeks to address how and why trust relations in the NHS may be changing and presents a theoretical framework for exploring them in future empirical research.

This paper provides a conceptual analysis. It proposes that public and patient trust in health care in the UK appears to be shaped by a variety of factors. From a macro perspective, any changes in levels of public trust in health care institutions appear to derive partly from top‐down policy initiatives that have altered the way in which health services are organised and partly from broader social and cultural processes. A variety of policy initiatives, including the introduction of clinical governance and the resulting use of performance management to scrutinise and change clinical activity, increasing patient choice and involvement in decision‐making regarding their care, are examined for how they have changed the context for trust relations within the NHS.

It is argued that these policy initiatives have produced a new context for trust relations within the NHS, shifting the inter‐dependence and distribution of power between patients, clinicians, and mangers and changing their vulnerability to each other and to health care institutions. The paper presents a theoretical framework based on current policy discourses which illustrates how new forms of trust relations may be emerging in this new context of health care delivery, reflecting a change in motivations for trust from affect based to cognition based trust as patients, clinicians and managers become more active partners in trust relations. The framework suggests that trust relations in all three types of relationship in the “new” modernised NHS might, in general, be particularly characterised by an emphasis on communication, providing information and the use of “evidence” to support decisions in a reciprocal, negotiated alliance.

The paper examines the drivers for change in trust in health care relations in the UK and develops a theoretical framework for the emergence of new trust relations that can be subsequently explored through empirical research.

This study aims to comprehensively investigate the electron beam powder bed fusion (EB-PBF) process for copper, offering validated estimations of melt pool temperature and morphology through numerical and analytical approaches. This work also assesses how process parameters influence the temperature fluctuations and the morphological changes of the melt pool.

Two distinct methods, an analytical model and a numerical simulation, were used to assess temperature profiles, melt pool morphology and associated heat transfer mechanisms, including conduction and keyhole mode. The analytical model considers conduction as the dominant heat transfer mechanism; the numerical model also includes convection and radiation, incorporating specific parameters such as beam power, scan speed, thermophysical material properties and powder interactions.

Both the analytical model and numerical simulations are highly correlated. Results indicated that the analytical model, emphasising material conduction, exhibited exceptional precision, although at substantially reduced cost. Statistical analysis of numerical outcomes underscored the substantial impact of beam power and scan speed on melt pool morphology and temperature in EB-PBF of copper.

This numerical simulation of copper in EB-PBF is the first high-fidelity model to consider the interaction between powder and substrate comprehensively. It accurately captures material properties, powder size distribution, thermal dynamics (including heat transfer between powder and substrate), phase changes and fluid dynamics. The model also integrates advanced computational methods such as computational fluid dynamics and discrete element method. The proposed model and simulation offer a valuable predictive tool for melt pool temperature, heat transfer processes and morphology. These insights are critical for ensuring the bonding quality of subsequent layers and, consequently, influencing the overall quality of the printed parts.