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Closing the loop at the end of products' useful life is earning increased attention from industry and academia. The recent or upcoming enactment of regulations regarding the management of end‐of‐life products is forcing manufacturers to consider strategies to increase the residual value of the products they make. Facilitating the residual value extraction process for end‐of‐life products is a challenging issue deserving investigation. This paper proposes to investigate this issue.

This paper analyzes empirical evidence from a sample of 205 environmentally responsive SMEs operating in the fabricated metal products and electric/electronic products industries. A coherent research model is developed which classifies the closed‐loop supply chain (CLSC) activities along two dimensions, the forward and reverse supply chains.

This first proposed taxonomy has been shown to be relevant for both sectors. The results also demonstrate that firms' abilities to implement CLSC environmental initiatives vary in their intensity and in their locus along the product value chain. Furthermore, benefits derived from these initiatives seem to vary according to the strategy favored by the firms.

This research is valuable for those firms interested in implementing CLSC strategies in a synergistic manner with their forward supply chain.

Within the framework of image reconstruction in cylindrical electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) sensors, the purpose of this study is to select the structure of a sensor in terms of number and size of the electrodes, to predict the radius and the position of a single circular shape lying in the cross-section defined by the sensor electrodes.

Nonlinear black-box models using a set of physically independent capacitances and least-square support vector machines models selected with a sophisticated validation method are implemented.

The coordinates of circular shapes are well estimated in fixed and variable permittivity environments even with noisy data. Various numerical experiments are presented and discussed. Sensors formed by three or four electrodes covering 50 per cent of the sensor perimeter provide the best prediction performances.

The proposed method is limited to the detection of a single circular shape in a cylindrical ECT sensor.

This method can be advantageously implemented in real-time applications, as it is numerically cost-effective and necessitates a small amount of measurements.

The contribution is two-fold: a fast computation of a circular shape position and radius with a satisfactory precision compared to the sensor size, and the determination of a cylindrical ECT sensor architecture that allows the most efficient predictions.

Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.