Combining Design of Experiments Techniques, Connectionist Models, and Optimization for the Efficient Design of New Product Formulations

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Navid Omidbakhsh ◽  
Ali Elkamel ◽  
Thomas A. Duever ◽  
Park M. Reilly

Product formulation design has seen an increasing attention because of the rising demand for application-specific products such as paints, adhesives, coating chemicals, detergents, disinfectants, pharmaceuticals, etc. However, new product formulation design is becoming increasingly difficult in today's markets due to tough competition. To survive and succeed, companies should be able to design new products in a short pace. Failure to do so can be very costly, not only in terms of market share lost, but also in the investment made to develop a product. Given that traditional product development methods are very slow, and cannot fulfill today's needs, a methodology is presented here to efficiently design new product formulations based on a combination of experimental designs, neural networks and optimization techniques. The methodology is applied on a case study that involves disinfectants' formulations. The framework takes advantage of all previous experiments for the next product formulation design, and archives experimental results of the existing project and uses them to retrain a model for future projects. The results show that the use of the proposed methodology significantly reduces the time and cost of product formulation. Although the methodology is applied to the case study of disinfectant formulation, it can be easily adopted to the design of other products.

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (15) ◽  
pp. 4566
Author(s):  
Minsoo Choi ◽  
Wongwan Jung ◽  
Sanghyuk Lee ◽  
Taehwan Joung ◽  
Daejun Chang

This study analyzes the thermodynamic, economic, and regulatory aspects of boil-off hydrogen (BOH) in liquid hydrogen (LH2) carriers that can be re-liquefied using a proposed re-liquefaction system or used as fuel in a fuel cell stack. Five LH2 carriers sailing between two designated ports are considered in a case study. The specific energy consumption of the proposed re-liquefaction system varies from 8.22 to 10.80 kWh/kg as the re-liquefaction-to-generation fraction (R/G fraction) is varied. The economic evaluation results show that the cost of re-liquefaction decreases as the re-liquefied flow rate increases and converges to 1.5 $/kg at an adequately large flow rate. Three energy efficient design index (EEDI) candidates are proposed to determine feasible R/G fractions: an EEDI equivalent to that of LNG carriers, an EEDI that considers the energy density of LH2, and no EEDI restrictions. The first EEDI candidate is so strict that the majority of the BOH should be used as fuel. In the case of the second EEDI candidate, the permittable R/G fraction is between 25% and 33%. If the EEDI is not applied for LH2 carriers, as in the third candidate, the specific life-cycle cost decreases to 67% compared with the first EEDI regulation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Tanguy Ophoff ◽  
Cédric Gullentops ◽  
Kristof Van Beeck ◽  
Toon Goedemé

Object detection models are usually trained and evaluated on highly complicated, challenging academic datasets, which results in deep networks requiring lots of computations. However, a lot of operational use-cases consist of more constrained situations: they have a limited number of classes to be detected, less intra-class variance, less lighting and background variance, constrained or even fixed camera viewpoints, etc. In these cases, we hypothesize that smaller networks could be used without deteriorating the accuracy. However, there are multiple reasons why this does not happen in practice. Firstly, overparameterized networks tend to learn better, and secondly, transfer learning is usually used to reduce the necessary amount of training data. In this paper, we investigate how much we can reduce the computational complexity of a standard object detection network in such constrained object detection problems. As a case study, we focus on a well-known single-shot object detector, YoloV2, and combine three different techniques to reduce the computational complexity of the model without reducing its accuracy on our target dataset. To investigate the influence of the problem complexity, we compare two datasets: a prototypical academic (Pascal VOC) and a real-life operational (LWIR person detection) dataset. The three optimization steps we exploited are: swapping all the convolutions for depth-wise separable convolutions, perform pruning and use weight quantization. The results of our case study indeed substantiate our hypothesis that the more constrained a problem is, the more the network can be optimized. On the constrained operational dataset, combining these optimization techniques allowed us to reduce the computational complexity with a factor of 349, as compared to only a factor 9.8 on the academic dataset. When running a benchmark on an Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier, our fastest model runs more than 15 times faster than the original YoloV2 model, whilst increasing the accuracy by 5% Average Precision (AP).


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-169
Author(s):  
Roghayeh Farsi

AbstractThe academic field of Qurʾānic Studies employs a wide range of approaches, each one of which helps to open up a new perspective on the Qurʾānic text. The Holy Book was revealed to guide people; it is thus of relevance to all aspects of people’s lives. This article focuses on the way social actors are represented in one Meccansūra, entitled “Ya-Sin”, and employs a case-study approach to do so. The analysis carried out includes the socio-semantic processes that thesūrauses in order to represent social actors either by behavior (action) or meaning (reflection), and it also analyzes the actors as they are represented in processes such as activation and passivation. The methodology adopted is eclectic and analytic. It is a hybrid of Swales’ move analysis, El-Awa’s identification of shift-markers, and Halliday’s and Van Leeuwen’s theories of social actor representation. This study shows how such an analysis can contribute to understanding the apparently fragmented and non-linear nature of “Ya-Sin”.


Author(s):  
J Poolton ◽  
I Barclay

There are few studies that have found an adequate means of assessing firms based on their specific needs for a concurrent engineering (CE) approach. Managers interested in introducing CE have little choice but to rely on their past experiences of introducing change. Using data gleaned from a nine month case study, a British-wide survey and a series of in-depth interviews, this paper summarizes the findings of a research study that examines how firms orientate themselves towards change and how they go about introducing CE to their operations. The data show that there are many benefits to introducing CE and that firms differ with respect to their needs for the CE approach. A tentative means to assess CE ‘needs’ is proposed which is based on the level of complexity of goods produced by firms. The method is currently being developed and extended to provide an applications-based framework to assist firms to improve their new product development performance.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 172-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Effrosyni Petala ◽  
Renee Wever ◽  
Chris Dutilh ◽  
Han Brezet

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1350
Author(s):  
Luz Elba Torres-Guevara ◽  
Vanessa Prieto-Sandoval ◽  
Andres Mejia-Villa

This paper contributes to the circular economy (CE) literature by investigating the drivers of success of the CE implementation in the construction sector and how those drivers can complement any implementation process in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). To do so, we analyzed the case of TECMO Estructuras Metálicas, using the methodology proposed by Jaca and colleagues to implement the CE in SMEs. It is a Colombian company with more than five decades of experience in the manufacture and installation of steel and aluminum structures for small and large building and infrastructure projects. The data were collected between August 2019 and November 2020 through direct communication with the company via workshops, meetings, and company reports. This research found that five drivers are relevant for implementing CE in the construction sector: fertile ecosystem, management commitment, identification of valuable materials, green teams, and CE intermediaries. Moreover, this study also contributes to teaching the implementation of the CE in companies, since it shows that through the methodology presented, implementation projects can be developed in postgraduate classes.


2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrieta Pavolová ◽  
Adriana Csikósová ◽  
Tomáš Bakalár

AbstractThe development of the regions in Slovakia in recent years has significant disparities in both so-cio-economic as well as environmental issues, as evidenced by the eight environmentally polluted areas (these areas are highly urbanised with industrial agglomerations or intensive agricultural production).This article deals with a management system model of regional by implementation of projects in environmental field of water management with application-specific benefits and risks arising from the process of their implementation in relation to regional development. It analyses projects in the area of water management of one of the regions of Slovakia, KoŠice region in particular, in terms of connection to public water duct and sewer, identifes a strategy for development of the region and its socio-economic and environmental benefits based on the analysis of drinking water, the quan-tity and quality of treated wastewater through wastewater treatment plants (WTPs). It identifes the infuencing factors of benefits and risks and proposes procedure for solving at various stages.


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