Search results

This paper aims to investigate the thermal characteristics of the clutch hydraulic system under various oil flow conditions. Increasing the oil flow is one of the most important approaches to reduce the clutch temperature. However, the effect of the oil flow on the clutch temperature remains to be explored.

The thermal resistance network model and the lumped parameter method are used to study the thermal characteristics of the clutch hydraulic system. The predicted temperature variations of the clutch and the oil are compared with experimental data.

Results demonstrate that the larger the friction power is, the higher the temperatures of the clutch and the oil are. However, the temperature growth rates of the clutch and oil present different trends: the former decreases gradually and the latter increases constantly. Additionally, increasing the oil flow within a certain range gives rise to the decrease of clutch temperature and the increase of oil temperature; nevertheless, their variation trends are gradually weakening. When the oil flow is large enough, it brings a slight effect on the clutch temperature rise.

This paper extends the knowledge into the oil flow supply of the clutch hydraulic system. The conclusions can provide a theoretical guidance for the oil management of the transmission system. Additionally, the thermal resistance network model is also effective and efficient for other hydraulic equipment to predict the temperature variation.

This paper aims to study and compare the friction stability of wet paper-based clutches with regard to the radial grooves (RG) and waffle grooves (WG).

This paper presents an experimental study of a wet clutch concerning the effect of groove patterns on the friction torque and surface temperature. The friction stabilities of RG and WG are investigated with the applied pressure, rotating speed and automatic transmission fluid (ATF) temperature taken into consideration.

The friction torque and surface temperature of WG are larger than those of RG under the same operating condition. The friction torque difference between RG and WG grows with the increase of applied pressure and narrows with the increase of ATF temperature. Additionally, their temperature difference expands via increasing the rotating speed and ATF temperature or reducing the applied pressure; in this way, not only the variable coefficient difference between RG and WG can be narrowed, but also the friction stability of the clutch can be improved dramatically.

This paper explains the thermodynamic differences between RG and WG; moreover, it is verified experimentally that WG has a better friction stability than RG.

China is a fast‐growing economy, and many multinational companies (MNCs) have found their ways to infiltrate that market. The competition among the MNCs has generated human resource management (HRM) problems. When formulating approaches in dealing with these problems, the expatriate management of the MNCs often “speak for” their local employees, as if the latter has no voice of its own. It is suspected that MNCs know partly what their local employees value. With such limited understanding, the former may be ineffective in managing their local staff. The purpose of this paper is to report a study that explores the HRM problems from local employees' perspectives. To understand Chinese employees, the conceptual lens, stemmed from Chinese philosophical traditions instead of that derived from western experience, is used.

Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews with Chinese employees working in MNCs.

The findings suggest that “asymmetrical understanding” exists between expatriate managers and their Chinese employees, and that the former may know much less about the latter than it is normally assumed.

The findings, illustrated through interviews, have shed light on how MNCs could manage their Chinese employees, and how a meaningful dialogue could take place: understanding the other (Chinese employees) on their own intellectual ground to overcome “asymmetrical understanding”.

By allowing the voice of the other to come forth rather than to keep it in the background as, at best, a whisper, the study helps create a platform for a meaningful cross‐cultural dialogue between voices from the west and the other.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This paper aims to compare the Greek and Chinese rhetorical traditions and explore their influences on today’s business and marketing communication across relevant cultures. In particular, it uses the Aristotelian persuasive orientations as reference points to introduce the Chinese rhetoric, and interpret cultural differences in persuasion from a historical and sociocultural perspective. It has been found that Greek and Chinese rhetoric and persuasion were developed to meet the needs of the social and cultural environments and this rule still applies to today’s business communication. The logical approach has been emphasised in the English rhetorical tradition while both qing (emotional approach) and li (logical approach) are the focus of persuasion in the Chinese tradition. This difference is also the root of cultural differences in modern business communication. Findings from both English and Chinese texts and data are examined to substantiate our focal argument.

This paper aims to promote an expanded two‐way dialog between Chinese and Western leaders and executives which recognizes that “wisdom” can flow in both directions.

Interviews were undertaken with three Chinese executives and analyzed against a model of performance excellence.

An understanding of some of the similarities and differences of Western and Chinese business practices and a conclusion that there are lessons for Western businesses to learn.

The work involved interviews with only three Chinese executives and thus represents a tiny sample.

Illustrates some of the practices that might be worth considering by the West as we climb out of the current economic depression and re‐focus business efforts for a longer‐term future.

The paper adopts a novel approach of analyzing interview outcomes against a reference model. The core value is, however, in highlighting the benefits that might arise from extended dialog.

The purpose of this paper is to find an efficient fabric defect detection algorithm by means of exploring the sparsity characteristics of main local binary pattern (MLBP) extracted from the original fabric texture.

In the proposed algorithm, original LBP features are extracted from the fabric texture to be detected, and MLBP are selected by occurrence probability. Second, a dictionary is established with MLBP atoms which can sparsely represent all the LBP. Then, the value of the gray-scale difference between gray level of neighborhood pixels and the central pixel, and the mean of the difference which has the same MLBP feature are calculated. And then, the defect-contained image is reconstructed as normal texture image. Finally, the residual is calculated between reconstructed and original images, and a simple threshold segmentation method can divide the residual image, and the defective region is detected.

The experiment result shows that the fabric texture can be more efficiently reconstructed, and the proposed method achieves better defect detection performance. Moreover, it offers empirical insights about how to exploit the sparsity of one certain feature, e.g. LBP.

Because of the selected research approach, the results may lack generalizability in chambray. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

In this paper, a novel fabric defect detection method which extracts the sparsity of MLBP features is proposed.

Academic and industrial researches on nanoscale flows and heat transfers are an area of increasing global interest, where fascinating phenomena are always observed, e.g. admirable water or air permeation and remarkable thermal conductivity. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the phenomena by the fractional calculus.

This paper begins with the continuum assumption in conventional theories, and then the fractional Gauss’ divergence theorems are used to derive fractional differential equations in fractal media. Fractional derivatives are introduced heuristically by the variational iteration method, and fractal derivatives are explained geometrically. Some effective analytical approaches to fractional differential equations, e.g. the variational iteration method, the homotopy perturbation method and the fractional complex transform, are outlined and the main solution processes are given.

Heat conduction in silk cocoon and ground water flow are modeled by the local fractional calculus, the solutions can explain well experimental observations.

Particular attention is paid throughout the paper to giving an intuitive grasp for fractional calculus. Most cited references are within last five years, catching the most frontier of the research. Some ideas on this review paper are first appeared.

This paper studies green vehicle routing problems of cold chain logistics with the consideration of the full set of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and an optimization model of green vehicle routing for cold chain logistics (with an acronym of GVRPCCL) is developed. The purpose of this paper is to minimize the total costs, which include vehicle operating cost, quality loss cost, product freshness cost, penalty cost, energy cost and GHG emissions cost. In addition, this research also investigates the effect of changing the vehicle maximum load in relation to cost and GHG emissions.

This study develops a mathematical optimization model, considering the total cost and GHG emission. The standard particle swarm optimization and modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO), based on an intelligent optimization algorithm, are applied in this study to solve the routing problem of a real case.

The results of this study show the extend of the proposed MPSO performing better in achieving green-focussed vehicle routing and that considering the full set of GHG costs in the objective functions will reduce the total costs and environmental-diminishing emissions of GHG through the comparative analysis. The research outputs also evaluated the effect of different enterprises’ conditions (e.g. customers’ locations and demand patterns) for better distribution routes planning.

There are some limitations in the proposed model. This study assumes that the vehicle is at a constant speed and it does not consider uncertainties, such as weather conditions and road conditions.

Prior studies, particularly in green cold chain logistics vehicle routing problem, are fairly limited. The prior works revolved around GHG emissions problem have not considered methane and nitrous oxides. This study takes into account the characteristics of cold chain logistics and the full set of GHGs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to have a huge impact on businesses and, especially, the way we think about supply chain management (SCM). However, there is still a paucity of studies on the impact of IoT adoption on supply chains and on different aspects of the business in general. The purpose of this paper is to examine the perception of the academic community of the impact of the IoT adoption in organizational supply chains with a view to verify potential key benefits and challenges existent in the literature. The research presents the impact on an organization along with the impact across its entire supply chain.

Data were collected through the use of an online survey and 87 participants completed the survey. Participants were mainly from the academic community and were university scholars based in different countries located in six continents. Participants were authors, or co-authors, of academic papers published in the Decision Science Institute 2015 and 2016 annual conference proceedings, the 21st International Symposium of Sustainable Transport and Supply Chain Innovations, the Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 2016 issues, and the Operations and Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 2016 issues.

The authors were able to confirm the significance of some of the examined potential benefits to individual organizations and their entire supply chains. However, the study identified other potential benefits that were not seen as a direct impact of IoT adoption. Most of the examined potential benefits were found to contribute to a number of critical success factors for implementing successful SCM. The authors were also able to confirm that some of the examined potential challenges were still perceived as key hinders to IoT adoption but examined potential challenges were not seen as hurdles to IoT adoption.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind. Although some literature attempted to provide an overview about the IoT management, no study has specifically explored potential benefits and challenges related to the adoption of IoT in supply chains and ranked them based on their significance. The results can be beneficial to academic scholars interested in the researched topic, business professionals, organizations within different sectors, and any other party interested in understanding more about the impact of adopting IoT on SCM.