Integrating multiscale modeling and optimization for sustainable process development

Forty years of Heat Integration: Pinch Analysis (PA) and Mathematical Programming (MP)

The development of facilities management-development process (FM-DP) integration framework

Bellows is a component in piping systems which absorbs mechanical deformation with flexibility. Its geometry is an axial symmetric shell which consists of two toroidal shells and one annular plate or conical shell. In order to analyze bellows, this study presents the finite element analysis using a conical frustum shell element. A finite element analysis is developed to analyze various bellows. The validity of the developed program is verified by the experimental results for axial and lateral stiffness. The formula for calculating the natural frequency of bellows is made by the simple beam theory. The formula for fatigue life is also derived by experiments. The shape optimal design problem is formulated using multiple objective optimization. The multiple objective functions are transformed to a scalar function by weighting factors. The stiffness, strength and specified stiffness are considered as the multiple objective function. The formulation has inequality constraints imposed on the fatigue limit, the natural frequencies, and the manufacturing conditions. Geometric parameters of bellows are the design variables. The recursive quadratic programming algorithm is selected to solve the problem. The results are compared to existing bellows, and the characteristics of bellows is investigated through optimal design process. The optimized shape of bellows is expected to give quite a good guideline to practical design.

An approach to multiscale modelling with graph grammars.

This thesis is a manifestation of efforts to integrate FM into the development process through a greater involvement of Facilities Managers in the property development industry. It also presents an original contribution to knowledge in a form of a validated best practice, which is identified as the facilities management-development process (FM-DP) integration framework. The framework potentially serves as a guide to Facilities Managers and other professionals in various organisations in the property development industry to optimise the value of Facilities Management (FM) in the development project and to achieve sustainable development. The study was conducted as an exploratory sequential mixed methods design in order to identify the issues that limit Facilities Managers from being involved in the property development industry, when they are known to be an appropriate professional to optimise the value of FM in the development process. Qualitative approach has been used as a core component of this research in order to obtain confirmation of the critical issues obtained from the literature review. To develop the framework, a survey questionnaire was used followed by relevant statistical procedure and analysis. To ensure validation, a member-checking approach was implemented through focus group interview. The validated framework reveals that there are 52 best practices to be considered by Facilities Managers or other professionals in the property development industry to optimise the role of FM in the development process for sustainable development. In addition, the framework discovers that best practices are required in all stages of the development process. Nevertheless, Stage 4: Technical Design is crucial, as it requires most of the best practices that drive the integration of FM into the development process. The framework demonstrates a ‘killing two birds with one stone’ strategy: (i) exploiting the framework is expected to increase the profile of FM among other professionals, (ii) encouraging a greater involvement of Facilities Managers in the property development industry, which (iii) leads the project to a sustainable development agenda.

Agile development processes such as Scrum have been successfully applied in the software industry for many years. Based on experience, industrial practitioners indicate three predominant benefits of agile development processes compared to traditional software development processes. First of all, development results better fit customers’ and other stakeholders’ needs. That is because they are intensively involved in the development process by receiving, applying and assessing functional software increments in a defined cadence throughout the development process. Secondly, agile development processes better cope with unexpected changes in the development process due to the built-in process flexibility. Lastly, development speed has significantly increased in most of the agile software development projects, resulting in a shorter time-to-market. Especially in the context of radical innovations for technical systems, manufacturing companies are striving for approaches to optimize their development processes in a similar direction. Traditional plan-oriented development approaches such as VDI 2221 or Cooper’s Stage-Gate Process turn out to be insufficiently customer oriented, too inflexible and project duration is usually too long to reach an adequate time-to-market. For that reason, a large community in academia and industrial practice is developing and implementing approaches to adapt agile software development practices for the development of technical systems. However, a current study in industrial practice reveals that out of 23 objectives, that are expected when introducing agile development processes to technical systems, the three objectives mentioned above, show the largest negative deviations from expected benefit to realized benefit. Therefore, the overall goal of this research is to address these gaps by developing an explicit methodological approach for an agile development of technical systems. It turns out, that mainly the role of prototyping and the way product specifications are handled during the development process change significantly in the course of introducing agility to development of technical systems. Agile practitioners strive to not necessarily define product specifications comprehensively upfront, as it is postulated in plan-oriented development processes. In contrast, product specifications, which are of major importance to the overall development project, are specified and validated with customers and other stakeholders in early prototypes. Therefore, prototypes are realized in a defined cadence throughout the development process to gradually specify and validate the product. However, the way product specifications are prioritized and selected in the development of technical systems has to differ substantially from the general way Scrum or other existing agile development processes propose. That is because technical systems are characterized by multiple technical interrelations, resulting in informational dependencies for the development process. For that reason, a prioritization along criteria such as customer value, development effort and risk seems too narrow in the context of technical systems. In fact, the prioritization of product specifications has to consider both, the value being generated by their realization as well as the informational dependencies towards other specifications. Furthermore, when designing a prototype, time constraints need to be particularly considered due to lead times in parts delivery and prototype production. Therefore, this paper introduces a methodology to prioritize and select technical design parameters in agile development processes. The methodology can be applied in the cyclical sprint planning that aims at defining the scope of the next prototype to be developed. As outlined above, the major paradigms of value generation, informational dependencies as well as lead-time and effort are crucial when adapting agile for technical systems and are consequently implemented in the methodology. These paradigms are operationalized to explicitly address the mentioned major objectives of agile development processes, which are currently showing are large gap between expected benefit and realized benefit in industrial practice. The methodology is applied to the real development process of an RGB laser light source for digital cinema projectors, which is summarized as a case study in the paper. Insights from this application are equally discussed as the resulting next steps in further developing and aligning the methodology to the needs of industrial practice.

This study takes the technological innovation of pharmaceutical process as the starting point to explore its importance in the current pharmaceutical industry background. The purpose is to analyze the key problems of pharmaceutical process optimization and put forward the corresponding technological innovation strategies. In terms of methods, this study analyzed the characteristics and challenges of pharmaceutical process in detail from three dimensions of intelligent control technology, green production technology and process integration and optimization technology, and discussed how to improve process efficiency and product quality through technological innovation. The results show that the application of intelligent control technology, green production technology and process integration and optimization technology can effectively improve the automation level, environmental protection standard and production efficiency of pharmaceutical process. It is concluded that the technological innovation combined with the characteristics of the process is the key to promote the sustainable development of the pharmaceutical process, and has great significance to enhance the overall competitiveness of China's pharmaceutical industry.

Biomass is a renewable, yet scarce resource since land is limited. This thesis addresses the question how to efficiently convert the available lignocellulosic biomass and biomass wastes to fuel and other useful energy services. In particular, it presents a systematic methodology for the conceptual design of thermochemical processes and demonstrates it at the production of Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG) through conventional biomass gasification and methanation, or hydrothermal gasification of biomass wastes. Through an appropriate mathematical decomposition of the design problem, thermo-economic process modelling, advanced process integration techniques and multi-objective optimisation are combined to provide a set of parameter- and scale-independent flowsheets for the optimal trade-off between several design targets. The results of various design studies consistently demonstrate that process integration plays a critical role in the synthesis of energy- and cost-efficient processes. It allows both for a rational energy recovery by cogeneration and process intensification. Considerable potential is furthermore assessed for combining several complementary processes for an appropriate and complete conversion of the resource, which might decidedly improve the environmental performance of fuel production from biomass and stresses the importance of a systematic process design.

Introducing a Polynomial Expression of Molecular Integrals for Algebraic the Molecular Orbital (MO) Equation

The large share of energy consumption in the residential sector has necessitated better understanding and evaluation of the energy needs in this sector, with the objective of identifying possible pathways for improvement. A series of approaches have been used in the literature to evaluate the current situation and predict the future energy and service needs of residential centres. High-level approaches evaluate the impact of long-term changes in the residential sector on the energy consumption and focus on determination of the energy supply requirements. Other approaches use input data with a higher level of detail and are used to estimate the energy consumption of individual users as representatives of the residential stock. This work uses heat signature models and climate data to build a parametrized residential sector profile for different climatic zones. The energy and service profile constructed herein is well-suited for exploring the best technologies for supplying residential requirements, drawing from the domain of process integration. This work demonstrates the usefulness of the residential profile by applying process integration techniques within a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation to evaluate optimal energy conversion technologies for two different district energy networks (DENs): the current network in place and a potential low-temperature refrigerant-based network. The results show that the refrigerant-based network, compared to the network in place, reduces energy consumption and operating cost by approximately 70 % and CO2 emissions by up to 100 %, depending on the mix of electricity used.

BackgroundProcedural time-outs and checklists are proven to be an effective means of improving teamwork and preventing wrong-sided procedures. The main objective of this study was to ensure that all regional...

Implications of Service-related Business Models on Product Development Processes

Background: Interest in the integration of the agile software development process(ASDP) and user-centred design (UCD) has grown over the last decade. However, there are not many papers that study this issue holistically and uncover the current state of this integration. Aim: This study sets out to answer the following research question: What is the current state of integration between agile processes and usability? Method: We conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS). We analyze the articles and the results were cross checked by the authors, and any disagreements were discussed and resolved in meetings. Results: We retrieved a total of 161 Primary Studies. There are very few papers that study the literature holistically and report the current state of usability in the ASDP. Conclusions: We categorized according to four criteria: process, practice, team and technology integration. The largest group refers to process integration with a total of 76 Primary Studies.

Aqueous Two‐Phase Systems (ATPS) is a primary recovery technique that has shown great potential for the efficient extraction and purification of high value biological compounds. The main advantages of this technique include scaling up feasibility, process integration capability and biocompatibility. In this review, the efficient use of ATPS for the extraction of proteins, genetic material, low molecular weight compounds, bioparticles, nanoparticles and cells is highlighted. The important role of ATPS in process integration, i.e., extractive conversion, extractive fermentation, cell disruption integrated with product recovery, and extractive purification, is discussed. A novel approach to protein molecular characterization combining ATPS and 2‐dimension electrophoresis (2‐DE) is introduced as a first step in the process development. Novel approaches for downstream processing using ATPS and dielectrophoresis are presented. Finally, trends concerning the application of ATPS strategies to address the future challenges of bioseparation are discussed.

As the industry develops processes for the 65 and 45 nm technology nodes, post etch/ash cleaning faces new challenges with far more stringent requirements on surface cleanliness and materials loss. The introduction and integration of new materials, such as metal hard mask, creates additional requirements for wafer cleaning due to the occurrence of new defect modes related to metal hard mask. These include organometallic residue and metal fluorite compounds precipitating with time. We have developed a novel aqueous solution (AQ) based single wafer cleaning process to address these new defect modes. Physical characterization results and process integration electrical data and reliability data (TEM cross section review of the vias) are presented in this paper.The main conclusions can be summarized as follows: (1) In the dual damascene Cu/low-k process flow with hard mask, there are three typical residues after etch/ash: generic polymer residue, organometallic residue strongly bonded to metal maks, and time-dependent metal fluoride residue. (2) Generic polymer residue is very well characterized [1,2] and is usually easy to remove with solvent or aqueous solution [2,3]. (3)We developed an oxidizing chemistry based process to undercut the hard mask for the organometallic residue removal, which proved highly effective. (4)The time-dependent metal fluoride reside makes queue time control after etch/ash very critical (<1 hour). We developed a process with a fluorine based aqueous chemistry to address the metal fluoride residue, which proved highly effective. With this new process, queue time control is not required. (5) The post etch/ash cleaning for the Cu/low-k structure with metal hard mask typically employs the solvent/dry plasma ash multi-step procedure [4]. The new process developed in this research reduced the multi-step process to one wet clean step with two different aqueous chemistries in sequence. (6) The integration electrical data shows that the new single step aqueous cleaning process performance is comparable to, or even better than that from the solvent/dry plasma ash multi cleaning process. (7) Blanket Cu loss with the new process is about 23A/min, however TEM analysis of the vias after full integration shows Cu loss, we are working to improve the integration related Cu loss.