1,721,009 research outputs found
Improving the Future of Carbon Fibre and its Composites
No full textThe ecological and financial demands on engineering components and structures
exploited in dynamic applications such as surface transport, flight and motorsport,
necessitate a significant reduction in mass to improve their efficiency. Fibre reinforced
composite materials, particularly those reinforced with carbon fibres are becoming
increasingly dominant in those industries as a consequence of their greatly improved
specific properties compared to more traditional metal alloys. The adoption of carbon fibre
materials is hindered however by their high cost and technological development which is
deemed to have “bottlenecked” over the last two decades. The production of carbon fibre
can be described as: “an inefficient, multi-step, international operation festooned with cost
centres, pulled by demand rather than driven by technology and application”. In summary,
the fibres are far more expensive than they ought to be, the technology of the finished
fibres has not changed since the early 1990s and the precursor is made using essentially
1960s chemistry.
The aim of this project is to research the business and manufacturing technology models
currently dominating the production of carbon fibre composites, in order to generate a
business and technical plan capable of creating a manufacturing plant ready to dominate
the industry. The key to a successful outcome is the reduction in costs and improvement
of the technology of carbon fibres, in order to increase the volume and diversity of
exploitation. The project objective is to specify a road map thorough enough for an
entrepreneur with sufficient investment capital to implement and create a functioning plant
which effectively manufactures composites up to and including their pre-impregnated
state.
This is a research project and as such all methods of manufacture are analysed, with a
view to selecting the optimum solution in order to improve this process and formulate a
plan to consolidate all carbon fibre manufacturing in one multi-function plant.
Consultations with experts within the composite industry have been carried out in order
to produce high quality data, and devise radical suggestions as to how the cost can be
lowered and the quality improved.
The location, funding and ownership is proposed to be within a Middle Eastern country
where there is ready access to the requisite resources. Sound technical and business
plans have been constructed, ensuring this venture transpires smoothly. A concurrent
research and development programme will produce higher yields in order to reduce costs,
improve the mechanical properties and develop a cheaper alternative than currently
utilised. The net result will exploit the industrial marketplace, and further development of
additives to improve toughness, fire retardancy and electrical properties will allow for a
much more diverse range of exploitation
Optimisation of screw anchor lateral capacity in sand for offshore renewable energy applications
Full text linkScrew piles or screw anchors are a promising solution to anchor floating offshore renewable energy devices, such as wind turbines or tidal turbines. The installation generates limited noise (driven piles are noisy) and can be undertaken in all soil conditions. Although they are mainly used for their large uplift capacities, screw anchors can also be designed to provide significant lateral resistance. The optimisation of screw anchor design does not rely only on the geotechnical assessment of the uplift capacity based on soil strength, but also on operational (installation requirements) and structural (helix bending, core section stress, limiting steel plate thickness) constraints. This paper develops a methodology for the design optimisation of screw anchors under lateral loading in dense sand, incorporating all of these constraints, based on simplified analytical or semi-analytical approaches. The results show that it is possible to optimise the anchor design, maximising the anchor lateral capacity, whilst minimising the anchor weight. The maximum embedment depth and then the anchor capacity is mainly limited by the maximum torque available during installation and the short-pile to long-pile failure mechanism transition respectively
Screw pile design optimisation under tension in sand
Full text linkMany applications in offshore engineering, such as floating or jacket-founded wind turbines or wave energy converters, require a significant uplift capacity of their foundations to be kept in place. Straight-shafted or suction piles in sands have a limited uplift capacity as they resist by friction only. In contrast, screw piles or screw anchors are a promising solution which provides a similar capacity to plate anchors and does not generate disturbance for marine mammals (e.g. from pile driving operations). The optimisation of the screw pile design does not rely only on the geotechnical assessment of the uplift capacity based on soil strength, but also on operational (installation requirements) and structural (helix bending, core section stress, limiting steel plate thick-ness) constraints. This paper develops a methodology for the design optimisation of screw piles under pure ten-sion in sand, incorporating all of these constraints, based on simplified analytical or semi-analytical approaches. The results show that the uplift capacity provided by an optimised screw pile is able to meet the needs of the offshore industry, across a range of soil densities and different applications (jacket foundation pile or tension leg platform anchor), providing that adequate installation plant could be dev
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Optimised design of screw anchors in tension in sand for renewable energy applications
Full text linkThe offshore deployment of floating offshore structures such as wind turbines or wave energy converters is expected to strongly increase during the next decade, to face the appetite for green energy sources. The growing size of these structures’ dimensions, inducing very large mooring forces, makes the anchoring solution adopted a critical issue for the commercial success of floating marine energy farms. The upscaling of the screw anchor technology from onshore to the offshore environment has been recently proposed as an efficient way of providing a large tension capacity while their installation generates far less noise and vibrations than impact pile driving. Most of recent studies on screw anchors have focused on separated geotechnical problems such as their uplift capacity or installation requirements. This paper incorporates within a single procedure geotechnical and structural constraints to calculate the optimal anchor geometry able to maximise the uplift capacity available. Performance envelopes for screw anchors have been derived in a parametric study, covering a broad range of soil conditions as well as in a case study, representative of offshore conditions. Results show that single screw anchors are more efficient (e.g. shorter and lighter) than driven piles to sustain tension loading. The results presented in this study support the applicability of screw anchors to be used as part of the mooring system for wave energy converters. However, tension requirements for tension-leg platform wind turbines would probably require the use of group of anchors.</p
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
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