bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Green maintainability design criteria for nanostructured titanium dioxide (TiO2) façade coatings
Authors: Chew Michael Y.L. , Conejos Sheila , Law Jessie Sze Long 
Published: July 2017

PurposeNanostructured titanium dioxide (TiO2) coatings can potentially address the current surge in façade cleaning cost, maintenance and labour problems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate potential maintainability issues and design challenges concerning the effective performance of TiO2façade coatings’ hydrophilic properties, especially in tropical environments such as Singapore. This paper aims to establish a list of green maintainability design criteria to help minimise future TiO2façade coating issues when this coating is applied on commercial buildings with concrete and stonemasonry façade materials.Design/methodology/approachA mixed-mode approach that includes a literature review, site investigation, instrumental case studies and expert interviews is used in this study.FindingsTiO2coatings help improve façade performance whilst offering environmental benefits to society. This study reports that green maintainability design criteria are vital requirements in designing sustainable buildings at the outset. The identified defects and issues will aid in ensuring the effectiveness of TiO2application in building façades.Originality/valueThis study acts as a foundation for future researchers to strengthen this little researched area, serves as a useful guide in preventing possible TiO2coating issues and promotes industry awareness of the use of TiO2façade coatings.
The effect of joint clearance on the dynamic behavior of a needle driver mechanism in a typical sewing machine
Authors: Salahshoor Esmaeil , Ebrahimi Saeed 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of joint clearance on the behavior of a needle driver mechanism (a slider-crank linkage) of a typical sewing machine with an imperfect joint between the coupler and the slider (including needle).

Design/methodology/approach
In order to model the clearance, the momentum exchange approach is used. The Lankarani and Nikravesh’s continuous contact force model is used to model the contact force, and the modified Coulomb’s friction law represents the friction between sliding members. The penetration force applied on the needle by fabric is chosen based on an experimental data in the literature. The dynamic response is validated for the existing properties in the literature without considering the penetration force.

Findings
It is shown that the clearance joint made considerable effect on the dynamic response of the system. The rough changes of the needle acceleration and jerk are obvious. The base reaction force changed roughly and did not vary as smooth as that of the mechanism with ideal joint. So, clearance joint in the mechanism could lead to an undesirable vibration in the system. Furthermore, the crank driver must provide a non-smooth moment on the crank to keep the crank rotational velocity constant. Moreover, reducing the clearance size sufficiently could make the dynamic response closer to that of the mechanism with ideal joint. In addition, smoother crank moment could be required if the clearance size is reduced sufficiently. Furthermore, the rough change of the base reaction force which can represent the vibration caused by the mechanism on the fixed frame could be reduced if the clearance size is small enough.

Originality/value
Lockstitch sewing machine is one of the most common apparel industrial machines. The needle driver mechanism of a sewing machine could have an important role for proper stitch forming. On the other hand, clearances are inevitable in assemblage of mechanisms to allow the relative motion between the members. This clearance is due to machining tolerances, wear, material deformations, and imperfections, and it can worsen mechanism performance such as precision, dynamic behavior and vibration. Unfortunately, despite the importance of the dynamic behavior of the needle driver mechanism from practical point of view, very little publications have focused especially on the investigation of the effect of clearance joint on the dynamic behavior of the sewing machine which could lead to undesired vibration of the system and shorter lifetime as a result. In this paper, the dynamic behavior of the system including, needle velocity and acceleration, crank moment and base reaction force was compared with that of the ideal mechanism. Finally, the effect of clearance size on the dynamic behavior of the system was investigated.
Approximating interior bounded box of 3D character mesh model based on its skeleton and symmetry
Authors: Xu Hanxiang , Guo Shihui , Yao Junfeng , Thalmann Nadia Magnenat 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
In the process of robot shell design, it is necessary to match the shape of the input 3D original character mesh model and robot endoskeleton, in order to make the input model fit for robot and avoid collision. So, the purpose of this paper is to find an object of reference, which can be used for the process of shape matching.

Design/methodology/approach
In this work, the authors propose an interior bounded box (IBB) approach that derives from oriented bounding box (OBB). This kind of box is inside the closed mesh model. At the same time, it has maximum volume which is aligned with the object axis but is enclosed by all the mesh vertices. Based on the IBB of input mesh model and the OBB of robot endoskeleton, the authors can complete the process of shape matching. In this paper, the authors use an evolutionary algorithm, covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES), to approximate the IBB based on skeleton and symmetry of input character mesh model.

Findings
Based on the evolutionary algorithm CMA-ES, the optimal position and scale information of IBB can be found. The authors can obtain satisfactory IBB result after this optimization process. The output IBB has maximum volume and is enveloped by the input character mesh model as well.

Originality/value
To the best knowledge of the authors, the IBB is first proposed and used in the field of robot shell design. Taking advantage of the IBB, people can quickly obtain a shell model that fit for robot. At the same time, it can avoid collision between shell model and the robot endoskeleton.
Two efficient methods for solving Schlömilch’s integral equation
Authors: AL-Jawary Majeed Ahmed , Radhi Ghassan Hasan , Ravnik Jure 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
In this paper, the exact solutions of the Schlömilch’s integral equation and its linear and non-linear generalized formulas with application are solved by using two efficient iterative methods. The Schlömilch’s integral equations have many applications in atmospheric, terrestrial physics and ionospheric problems. They describe the density profile of electrons from the ionospheric for awry occurrence of the quasi-transverse approximations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach
First, the authors apply a regularization method combined with the standard homotopy analysis method to find the exact solutions for all forms of the Schlömilch’s integral equation. Second, the authors implement the regularization method with the variational iteration method for the same purpose. The effectiveness of the regularization-Homotopy method and the regularization-variational method is shown by using them for several illustrative examples, which have been solved by other authors using the so-called regularization-Adomian method.

Findings
The implementation of the two methods demonstrates the usefulness in finding exact solutions.

Practical implications
The authors have applied the developed methodology to the solution of the Rayleigh equation, which is an important equation in fluid dynamics and has a variety of applications in different fields of science and engineering. These include the analysis of batch distillation in chemistry, scattering of electromagnetic waves in physics, isotopic data in contaminant hydrogeology and others.

Originality/value
In this paper, two reliable methods have been implemented to solve several examples, where those examples represent the main types of the Schlömilch’s integral models. Each method has been accompanied with the use of the regularization method. This process constructs an efficient dealing to get the exact solutions of the linear and non-linear Schlömilch’s integral equation which is easy to implement. In addition to that, the accompanied regularization method with each of the two used methods proved its efficiency in handling many problems especially ill-posed problems, such as the Fredholm integral equation of the first kind.
Can foreign aid motivate institutional reform? An evaluation of the HIPC Initiative
Authors: Schlosky Minh Tam , Young Andrew 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
A number of political economy concerns are associated with the provision of foreign aid to developing economies. These concerns suggest that foreign aid is likely to have harmful effects on a recipient’s institutional quality, and that attempts to give aid conditional on policy and institutional reforms are unlikely to succeed. Established in 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative is a comprehensive, structured attempt to provide multilateral foreign aid conditional on reforms in recipient countries. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate its effectiveness at affecting institutional reform in participating countries.

Design/methodology/approach
The authors document how participating countries fared in terms of the quality of their policies and institutions. The authors employ the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index as a measure of economic institutions, and the Freedom House political rights (PR) and civil liberties indices as measures of PR and protections. Based on these measures, the authors report unconditional statistics (e.g. average changes) and also regressions of changes in the measures on HIPC Initiative aid allocations and other controls.

Findings
The authors find that most participating countries experienced either meager increases or outright decreases in institutional quality. The regression results provide no evidence that the Initiative affects meaningful reforms.

Originality/value
The potential for foreign aid to have deleterious effects on the institutional quality of recipient countries has been of increasing concern to students of economic development. Such effects can have important implications for entrepreneurial activity in these countries. The HIPC Initiative is specifically designed to acknowledge and, indeed, overcome these concerns, leading to actual increases in institutional quality of recipient countries. To the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to assess whether the promise of the HIPC Initiative is being fulfilled.
Hybrid scheduling and maintenance problem using artificial neural network based meta-heuristics
Authors: Abedi Mehdi , Seidgar Hany , Fazlollahtabar Hamed 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a new mathematical model for the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with aging effects and multi-maintenance activities.

Design/methodology/approach
The authors assume that each machine may be subject to several maintenance activities over the scheduling horizon and a machine turn into its initial condition after maintenance activity and the aging effects start anew. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of early/tardy times of jobs and maintenance costs.

Findings
As this problem is proven to be non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard), the authors employed imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and genetic algorithm (GA) as solution approaches, and the parameters of the proposed algorithms are calibrated by a novel parameter tuning tool called Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The computational results clarify that GA performs better than ICA in quality of solutions and computational time.

Originality/value
Predictive maintenance (PM) activities carry out the operations on machines and tools before the breakdown takes place and it helps to prevent failures before they happen.
Advance selling with part payment for new to-be-released products
Authors: Tang Wangmei , Ang Sheng 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
The paper aims to study a strategy of advance selling with part payment (ADP) in which pre-ordering consumers are required to pay a portion of advance price first and then pay the rest in the spot period to complete the order. The authors compare the ADP strategy with strategies of advance selling with full payment (ADF) and no advance selling (NA) from the perspective of sellers.

Design/methodology/approach
The paper proposes a two-period pricing model with price-off promotion in the first period for a market consisting of consumers and a single seller. For each strategy (i.e. NA, ADF and ADP), solutions to the seller’s optimal order quantity in the spot period, optimal advance price and prepayment in the advance period are derived by backward conduction. Numerical study is also used to obtain straightforward insights.

Findings
Advance price of ADF is lower than that of ADP. Order quantity of ADF is higher than that of ADP. ADP brings more profit than the other two selling strategies, i.e. NA and ADF, when ADP’s implementing conditions are satisfied. While ADF is effective only when unit cost is low, ADP is applicable irrespective of whether the cost is low.

Originality/value
Existing researchers on advance selling mainly focus on the ADF strategy. The paper pays attention to different payment mechanisms in advance selling and steps further to propose a new form of advance selling, i.e. the ADP strategy. The effects of ADP on consumer’s purchasing behavior and seller’s marketing decisions are analyzed.
Simulation based study on improving the transient response quality of turbocharged diesel engines
Authors: Mishra Rakesh , Saad Syed Mohammad 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
Use of fossil fuels in automotive sector is one of the primary causes of greenhouse emissions. The automotive engines need to perform at their best efficiency point to limit these emissions. Most of the quality indicators in this regard are based on near steady state global operational characteristics for engines without considering local performance. In the present study, extensive numerical simulations have been carried out covering a wide range of steady state and transient operating conditions to quantify interaction of turbocharger with engines through turbo lag phenomena which may cause increased emissions during the load change conditions. Furthermore possible innovations have been explored to minimize turbo lag phenomena. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach
In this paper quality indicators have been developed to quantify the performance of turbocharged diesel engine under the transient event of rapid change in fueling rate which has been rarely investigated. The rate of fueling is changed from 40 mm3/injection to 52 mm3/injection at 1,000 rpm engine speed which corresponds to normal operating condition. To improve quality of transient response, torque assistance method and reduction of inertia of compressor wheel have been used. Parametric study has been undertaken to analyze the quality indicators such as outlet pressure of the compressor and the compressor speed. The turbo lag is quantified to obtain the close to optimal transient response of turbocharged diesel engine.

Findings
It has been shown that, with torque assist the transient response of the internal combustion engine is significantly improved. On the other hand, marginal improvement in transient response is observed by the reduction in inertia of the compressor wheel.

Research limitations/implications
The findings indicate that turbo lag can be minimized by providing torque assistance by active and passive means.

Practical implications
The developed methods can be used in practice for efficient operation of vehicles.

Social implications
The work carried out in the paper provides a way to minimize harmful emissions.

Originality/value
The quality indicators developed provide a quantitative measure of turbo lag phenomena and address the above mentioned problems.
Systematic risk-analysis to support a living maintenance programme for railway infrastructure
Authors: Söderholm Peter , Nilsen Terje 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe an application of an effective risk-based methodology to support a living maintenance programme for railway infrastructure.

Design/methodology/approach
The overall research strategy is a single case study of switches and crossings at the Iron Ore Line in northern Sweden. The analysis was performed as a risk workshop guided by a methodology that integrates reliability-centred maintenance and barrier analysis.

Findings
The applied methodology is valuable to systematise and improve the existing maintenance programme, as well as supporting a continued living maintenance programme.

Research limitations/implications
The single case study approach may decrease the validity of the achieved results. However, similar case studies corroborate the results, which affect the validity in a positive way.

Practical implications
The resulting maintenance programme is effective, through compliance with external requirements, and more efficient, through improvements of tasks and intervals.

Social implications
An enhanced railway infrastructure maintenance programme contributes to improved safety, punctuality, and costs. Hence, railway becomes a more attractive mode of transport. Thereby, it also supports a safety performance of the railway that society is willing to pay for.

Originality/value
Significant improvements of the maintenance programme are achieved through adjustment of inspection intervals and tasks. The results also support the development of indicators, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
Design and integration of a piezoelectric vibrating device in an LTCC structure
Authors: Belavič Darko , Bradeško Andraž , Kos Tomaz , Rojac Tadej 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
In this contribution, the design and integration of a piezoelectric vibrating device into low-temperature, co-fired ceramic (LTCC) structures are presented and discussed. The mechanical vibration of the diaphragm was stimulated with a piezoelectric actuator, which was integrated onto the diaphragm. Three different methods for the integration were designed, fabricated and evaluated.

Design/methodology/approach
The vibrating devices were designed as an edge-clamped diaphragm with an integrated piezoelectric actuator at its centre, whose role is to stimulate the vibration of the diaphragm via the converse piezoelectric effect. The design and feasibility study of the vibrating devices was supported by analytical methods and finite-element analyses.

Findings
The benchmarking of the ceramic vibrating devices showed that the thick-film piezoelectric actuator responds weakly in comparison with both the bulk actuators. On the other hand, the thick-film actuator has the lowest dissipation factor and it generates the largest displacement of the diaphragm with the lowest driving voltage. The resonance frequency of the vibrating device with the thick-film actuator is the most sensitive for an applied load (i.e. mass or pressure).

Research limitations/implications
Research activity includes the design and the fabrication of a piezoelectric vibrating device in the LTCC structure. The research work on the piezoelectric properties of integrated piezoelectric actuators was limited.

Practical implications
Piezoelectric vibrating devices were used as pressure sensors.

Originality/value
Piezoelectric vibrating devices could be used not only for pressure sensors but also for other type of sensors and detectors and for microbalances.
How important are earnings announcements in China?
Authors: Zou Liping , Wilson William Robert 
Published: July 2017

Purpose
This paper tests the information efficiency of the Chinese stock market to judge if it contravenes the Fama (1965) efficient market hypothesis. Following China’s stock market reforms the market has grown in international importance, however many find information difficult to obtain and interpret.

Design/methodology/approach
The relative importance of earnings announcements is quantified using cross-sectional regressions of calendar-year annual returns R_i on returns in the four quarterly earnings announcement windows return R_j. The metric developed by Ball and Shivakumar (2008) and Basu et al. (2013) is used to determine the level of new information contained in earnings announcements.

Findings
Analysis reveals earnings announcements contain little new information of value, thus demonstrating the Chinese markets are not informationally efficient. Therefore, investors cannot automatically assume assets are always correctly priced, as they are in other established markets.

Originality/value
Major structural changes were made to Chinese equity markets in 2004, with the introduction of the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors scheme. At the same time, firms were required to make earnings announcements on a quarterly basis. This paper is the first to test the impact of these changes on the information value of earnings announcements since the changes.
Detecting fraud in Chinese listed company balance sheets
Authors: Wei Yi , Chen Jianguo , Wirth Carolyn 
Published: July 2017

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the links between accounting values in Chinese listed companies’ balance sheets and the exposure of their fraudulent activities.Design/methodology/approachEvery balance sheet account is proposed to be a potential vehicle to manipulate financial statements.FindingsOther receivables, inventories, prepaid expenses, employee benefits payables and long-term payables are important indicators of fraudulent financial statements. These results confirm that asset account manipulation is frequently carried out and cast doubt on earlier conclusions by researchers that inflation of liabilities is the most common source of financial statement manipulation.Originality/valuePrevious practices of solely scaling balance sheet values by assets are revealed to produce spurious relationships, while scaling by both assets and sales effectively detects fraudulent financial statements and provides a useful fraud prediction tool for Chinese auditors, regulators and investors.