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This paper presents the results of the simulation of the forging of a connecting rod. The calculation has been carried out by the code FORGE3 developed at the CEMEF laboratory. FORGE3 is a three‐dimensional finite element computer program that can simulate hot forging of industrial parts. The flow problem is solved using a thermomechanical analysis. The mechanical resolution and the thermal one are coupled by the way of the consistency K which is thermodependent, the plastic deformation in the volume of the material and the friction heat flux on the surface. The material behaviour is assumed to be incompressible and viscoplastic (Norton—Hoff law) with the associated friction law. The thermal resolution includes the case of non‐linear physical properties and boundary conditions. An explicit Euler scheme is used for the mechanical resolution and two‐step schemes for the thermal one. For the computation of other parameters, it is necessary to have a good approximation for the strain rate tensor. The Orkisz method has been used to determine the deviatoric stress tensor and p is calculated by an original smoothing method. The results show that it is possible to get good information on the flow and on the physical properties during forging of automotive parts. Comparisons have been made with experimental measurements with a reasonably good agreement.

Numerical modelling and simulation of metal forming is rapidly gaining prominence in many industries all over the world due to its effective saving of production time, effort and economy. In order to meet this need a special finite element code FORGE2 has been developed at CEMEF. In this work the theoretical basis of the FORGE2 along with its features such as thermo‐viscoplastic coupling, material compressibility and automatic mesh regeneration is reviewed and an attempt is made to simulate a few industrial forming processes taking into account the complex friction phenomena and thermal environment.

This paper gives a review of the finite element techniques (FE) applied in the area of material processing. The latest trends in metal forming, non‐metal forming and powder metallurgy are briefly discussed. The range of applications of finite elements on the subjects is extremely wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore the aim of the paper is to give FE users only an encyclopaedic view of the different possibilities that exist today in the various fields mentioned above. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on finite element applications in material processing for the last five years, and more than 1100 references are listed.

The analysis of error estimation is addressed in the framework of viscoplasticity problems, this is to say, of incompressible and non‐linear materials. Firstly, Zienkiewicz—Zhu (Z²) type error estimators are studied. They are based on the comparison between the finite element solution and a continuous solution which is computed by smoothing technique. From numerical examples, it is shown that the choice of a finite difference smoothing method (Orkisz’ method) improves the precision and the efficiency of this type of estimator. Then a Δ estimator is introduced. It makes it possible to take into account the fact that the smoothed solution does not verify the balance equations. On the other hand, it leads us to introduce estimators for the velocity error according to the L² and L^∞norms, since in metal forming this error is as important as the energy error. These estimators are applied to an industrial problem of extrusion, demonstrating all the potential of the adaptive remeshing method for forming processes.

A new method of three‐dimensional remeshing is proposed for thermo‐viscoplastic finite element analysis of connecting rod forging. In the method, the deformed body to be remeshed is divided into a surface‐adaptive layer (SAL) and a core region. At the surface layer of hexahedral elements, the arrangement of nodal points is made by normal projection of boundary nodes in order to retard the mesh degeneracy, since the arrangement of boundary nodes can be easily achieved by using the information of the die surface patch. After generating the mesh automatically at the surface‐adaptive layer, the core region is automatically meshed by introducing a body‐fitted mapping technique. In order to show the effectiveness of the method in the three‐dimensional problem, forging of a connecting rod has been simulated as a practical example. The complete simulation of connecting rod forging has been carried out by using the thermo‐viscoplastic finite element method and the remeshing scheme. The analysis of transient heat transfer has been carried out for the workpiece by the finite element method, while the boundary element method has been used for the die.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors that influence patients’ long-term relationship with healthcare providers in healthcare delivery at hospitals.

Data were gathered using 170 patients in a cross-sectional survey with quantitative research methods at a public regional hospital. Results were obtained using descriptive analysis and regression analysis.

Generally, the study found that the health-related factors (the reception of staff, providers’ attitude, waiting time, competence and expertise and the hospital environment) that influence patients’ long-term relationship with the healthcare providers/hospital were statistically significant (p < 0.001). The findings showed that overall 90.0 per cent of the patients were very satisfied with the overall healthcare services at the hospital.

Limited sample size, lack of examination of healthcare providers’ perspectives and non-application of qualitative methods make it difficult to give a true picture of how these can enhance patients’ intent to keep a long-term relationship with the healthcare providers/hospital.

The paper suggests that health policymakers and practitioners need to enhance measures that will make patients satisfied leading to their long-term commitment and cordial relationship with the healthcare providers/hospital.

The study demonstrated how health-related factors will be associated with the patients’ agreement/intent to keep a long-term relationship with their service providers at hospitals. Thus, the overall hypothesis was true that there is a relationship between patients’ satisfaction with the healthcare experienced and their long-term relationship with healthcare providers/hospital.

This is one of the few studies conducted on the topic in the context of Ghana’s health sector. It recommends that there should be a good interpersonal relationship between healthcare providers and patients, as patients’ satisfaction is not based on only receiving treatment at the health facility.

The purpose of this paper is to select the optimal feature parameters to further improve the identification accuracy of cashmere and wool.

To increase the accuracy, the authors put forward a method selecting optimal parameters based on the fusion of morphological feature and texture feature. The first step is to acquire the fiber diameter measured by the central axis algorithm. The second step is to acquire the optimal texture feature parameters. This step is mainly achieved by using the variance of secondary statistics of these two texture features to get four statistics and then finding the impact factors of gray level co-occurrence matrix relying on the relationship between the secondary statistic values and the pixel pitch. Finally, the five-dimensional feature vectors extracted from the sample image are fed into the fisher classifier.

The improvement of identification accuracy can be achieved by determining the optimal feature parameters and fusing two texture features. The average identification accuracy is 96.713% in this paper, which is very helpful to improve the efficiency of detector in the textile industry.

In this paper, a novel identification method which extracts the optimal feature parameter is proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to use convolutional neural networks in order to solve the problem of the difficulty in the classification of cashmere and wool. To do the research, it proposes a low-dimensional strategy of using part-level features to enhance object-level features. The study aims to use computer version method to find out the most effective and robust method to manage the difficult task of cashmere and wool identification.

The authors try to get a coarse classification result and the initial weights of the model in the first step. The authors use the results of the first step and a Fast-RCNN method to extract part-level features in step 2. Finally, the authors mix the part-level features to enhance object-level features and classify the cashmere and wool images.

The paper finds that not only the texture is the key element of the cashmere and wool identification but also the image colors.

Most importantly, the paper finds that the part-level features can enhance object-level features in the fiber identification task. However, it does not work in contrast, and the strategy can be used in the similar fibers identifications.