1,720,988 research outputs found
Barriers to Industrial Energy Efficiency in Foundries: a European Comparison
No full textAccording to recent studies, the 20% European improvement in energy efficiency will not be achieved with current trends, even with the adoption of present policies to reduce primary energy use. This is due to the existence of several barriers that hinder the adoption of the energy-efficient technologies and practices. A relevant contribution to improved energy efficiency could come from the industrial sector, due to its relevance on total energy use. This study therefore addresses barriers within the European foundry industry, a major industrial energy user and a strategic player for the European economy. The research investigates the barriers to energy efficiency at 65 foundries, several of them small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), highlighting the critical problems and difficulties by evaluating the socio-technical frameworks against which the barriers have been categorized. Findings show that the greatest perceived barriers are the perception of the lack of resources to be devoted to improving energy efficiency, and the existence of other priorities such as the importance of guaranteeing business continuity. The study has also performed a preliminary analysis of the factors that might affect the perception of barriers. In particular, looking at size, smaller enterprises show a greater perception of the barriers than larger ones, mainly due to several organizational issues, but with effect on behavioural ones, that tend to downgrade energy efficiency to a peripheral issue. The study has also highlighted differences by type of alloy characterizing foundries, taken as proxy of the process complexity. Indeed, enterprises with simpler production processes tend to perceive higher barriers to energy efficiency, showing the need to identify effective means to promote energy efficiency among those enterprises. Moreover, the analysis has pointed out that performing energy audits brings more awareness to the enterprises, highlighting the effective existing difficulties in improving their energy efficiency. This result seems to be relevant since it shows the need for the research to analyze the awareness to energy efficiency in greater depth and develop the most effective policies to increase it at industrial level. Finally when looking at the country in which foundries operate, German enterprises tend to suffer from the barriers far less than the average, whilst a totally different behaviour can be observed for Swedish ones. These preliminary findings open the research to investigate in greater depth the factors leading to a different perception of barriers, and also the domestic policies that have led to those results. Moreover, the study opens to investigate which means, i.e. drivers, might be more effectively exploited at European level to promote industrial energy efficiency
Beyond Barriers – A Case Study on Driving Forces for Improved Energy Efficiency in the Foundry Industries in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Sweden
No full textEnergy management plays an important role in the transformation of industrial energy systems towards improved energy efficiency and increased sustainability. This paper aims to study driving forces for improved energy efficiency in some European energy-intensive foundry industries. The investigation has been conducted as a multiple case study involving 65 foundries located in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Sweden. The most relevant perceived driving forces were found to be financially related, followed by organizational driving forces. Nevertheless, some differences can be appreciated according to the firm's size and country. Almost half of the studied foundries lack a long-term energy strategy, about one-fourth stated that they have used Energy Performance Contracting (EPC), and only approximately one in ten foundries have used Third Party Financing (TPF). Among the studied foundries, three out of five have conducted an energy audit. On average, the energy saving potential according to the respondents is stated to be 7.5%. In conclusion, energy management in the European foundry industry, despite increasing energy prices and extensive energy policy actions taken by the EU, still seems to have great improvement potential, calling for future research and policy actions in the field
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
