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Family dinner on Lunar New Year's Eve is the most important and most ritualized feast for families in China. It is the time for the entire family to reunite. Families gather together to reflect their past and talk about the future. Through the lens of consumer culture theories, this study explores how Chinese consumers construct family identity.

Based on constant comparative analysis of primary data including in-depth interviews and participant observation, and secondary data including historical archives, cultural tracing, documentary reports and essays, the authors deconstruct the consumption rituals of family dinner on Chinese Lunar New Year's Eve. The authors focus on four aspects, including participants, place, time and related activities, and analyze Chinese consumers' ritual experiences.

The authors’ findings show how young consumers construct and strengthen individual self-identity, relational identity and family identity in various ways through consumption and ritual practices during Chinese Lunar New Year celebration.

The study of family dinner on Lunar New Year's Eve helps the authors understand contemporary consumer culture in three aspects. First, it helps the authors understand the relationship between consumption and culture. Second, the study shows the changes and continuities of consumption rituals. Third, the research highlights the experience of “home” among contemporary Chinese consumers.

Due to the harsh underground environment in coal mining, the surface of hydraulic support columns corrodes severely, resulting in significant economic losses. Therefore, a highly corrosion-resistant coatings is needed to extend the service life of the columns.

This study aims to compare the corrosion resistance of ST-Cr₃C₂-NiCr (sealed treatment Cr₃C₂-NiCr) coatings with industrially applied chromium plating. The corrosion failure mechanism of the coatings was investigated.

The results demonstrated that the ST-Cr₃C₂-NiCr coatings exhibited excellent corrosion resistance. After sealing treatment, the corrosion potential of Cr₃C₂-NiCr coatings was −0.215 V, and the corrosion current density of Cr₃C₂-NiCr coatings was lower than that of the plated parts.

ST-Cr₃C₂-NiCr coatings prepared by supersonic atmospheric plasma spraying could provide excellent corrosion resistance in the coal industry.

The low porosity and the presence of the NiCr phase were crucial factors contributing to the preferable corrosion resistance exhibited by the ST-Cr₃C₂-NiCr coatings. The corrosive process of the coatings involved layer-by-layer delamination of surface oxide film, sub-surface pitting, formation and degradation of sub-surface passive film, as well as severe block-like delamination.

Given the inevitable transition to renewable resource utilization and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions, this study conducted quasi natural experiments to assess the impact of renewable resource utilization on carbon emissions based on the national “urban mining” demonstration bases (NUMDB).

This study uses panel data from 275 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2019. The paper selects NUMDB as the proxy variable and conducts a quasi-natural experiment using a multi-period differences-in-differences model. We examine the impact of NUMDB on reducing carbon emissions, and then deeply explore its mechanism and spatial spillover effect.

This study found that: (1) the construction of NUMDB can significantly decrease the carbon emission in the host cities; (2) NUMDB’s construction has more significantly reduced the carbon emission in regions with higher levels of circular economy development, green technology innovation, regional environmental pollution, digital economy development and financial development; (3) by means of green technology innovation, optimized energy structure, and high-quality talent aggregation, NUMDB reduces urban carbon emissions; (4) NUMDB construction positively affects the carbon reduction efficiency of neighboring regions.

We propose corresponding policy suggestions to further promote the carbon emission reduction effect of NUMDB and develop the renewable resources industry in China based on the research findings.

The contributions of this paper are as follows. Our study contributes to expanding the research scope on the environmental impact of the renewable resource industry, as there are few quantitative studies in this area.

We further consider the spatial heterogeneity of policies and analyze the carbon reduction effect of the NUMDB from the city level, which is beneficial to exploring more targeted and operable carbon reduction paths.

This study on identifying the causal relationship between renewable resource utilization and carbon emission reduction helps to explore the sustainable development path of renewable resource more comprehensively. Meanwhile, this paper provides a reference for other countries to improve the utilization of renewable resource and effectively reduce carbon emissions.

The authors consider a dynamic emission-reduction technology investment decision-making problem for an emission-dependent dyadic supply chain consists of a manufacturer and a retailer under subsidy policy for carbon emission reduction. The consumers are assumed to prefer to low-carbon products and formulate a supply chain optimal control problem.

The authors adopt differential game to analyze investment strategies of cost subsidy coefficient with respect to vertical incentive of a manufacturer and a retailer. A comparison analysis under four different decision-making situations, including decentralized decision-making, centralized decision-making, maximizing social welfare, is obtained.

The results show that the economic benefit and environmental pressure have a win–win performance in centralized decision-making. In four different game models, equilibrium strategies, profits and social welfare show changing diversity and have a consistent development trend as time goes on.

The authors estimate the demand function is a linear function in this paper. According to the consumers’ preference to low-carbon products, consumer’s awareness meets the law of diminishing marginal utility like advertising goodwill accumulation. The carbon-sensitive coefficient might be a quadratic expression, which will complicate the problem and be consistent with reality.

It captures that there is a necessity to strengthen cooperation and exchange of carbon emission technology among the enterprises by simulation of different decision-makings when government granted cost subsidy.

The results provide significant guidelines for the supply chain to make decision-makings of emission-reduction technology investment and relevant government departments to determine emission subsidies costs.

An endogenous subsidies coefficient is produced by the social welfare function. Distinguished from previous study, it also considered the influences of carbon emission trade policy and consumer preference.

The hands of intelligent robots perceive external stimuli and respond effectively according to tactile or pressure sensors. However, the traditional tactile and pressure sensors cannot perform human-skin-like intelligent properties of high sensitivity, large measurement range, multi-function and flexibility simultaneously. The purpose of this paper is to present a flexible tactile-pressure sensor based on hyper-elastics polydimethylsiloxane and plate capacitance.

With regard to this problem, this paper presents a flexible tactile-pressure sensor based on hyper-elastics PDMS and plate capacitance. The sensor has a size of 10 mm × 10 mm × 1.3 mm and is composed of four upper electrodes, one middle driving electrode and one lower electrode. The authors first analyzed the structure and the tactile-pressure sensing principle of human skin to obtain the design parameters of the sensor. Then they presented the working principle, material selection and mechanical structure design and fabrication process of the sensor. The authors also fabricated several sample devices of the sensor and carried out experiments to establish the relationship between the sensor output and the pressure.

The results show that the tactile part of the sensor can measure a range of 0.05-1N/mm² micro pressure with a sensitivity of 2.93 per cent/N and a linearity of 0.03 per cent. The pressure part of the sensor can measure a range of 1-30N/mm² pressure with a sensitivity of 0.08 per cent/N and a linearity of 0.07 per cent.

This paper analyzes the tactile and pressure sensing principles of human skin and develop an intelligent sensitive human-skin-like tactile-pressure sensor for intelligent robot perception systems. The sensor can achieve to imitate the tactile and pressure function simultaneously with a measurement resolution of 0.01 N and a spatial resolution of 2 mm.

This paper aims to study the tribological behavior of the WS2/oil-impregnated porous polyimide (PPI) solid/liquid composite system, in which both PFPE (perfluoropolyether) and SiCH (silahydrocarbons) oils with different hydrocarbon chains were used, respectively. Lubricating mechanism of the composite system was also explored.

The tribological behaviors of the WS2 films against the PPI cylindrical pins before and after immersing oil were evaluated under different loads by a reciprocating-type ball-on-disc tribometer.

The composite system exhibited the low and stable friction coefficient after the running-in stage, and the lubricant oil played a positive effect. It was found that the WS2/PFPE composite system exhibited more excellent lubricating property, although sole SiCH far exceeds PFPE in lubrication. The abnormal phenomenon mainly resulted from the influence of the oil amount. XRD results on the wear track surfaces indicated that PFPE and SiCH oils with different hydrocarbon chains were likely to preferentially adsorb to the edge plane and basal plane of the WS2 crystals, respectively.

In previous studies, liquid lubricants were directly dripped or spin-coated on the solid lubricant surface. Based on its potential advantage in application, the tribological behavior and mechanism of the solid lubricating film/oil-impregnated PPI composite system were investigated in this study.

The aim of this paper is to present the main findings of the studies in the field of quality management (QM) in primary and secondary education. Grouping these findings into themes and these themes, in turn, into broad categories as well as prioritizing the themes of findings are also aims of the present study.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of articles focusing on QM in primary and secondary education was carried out based on major publishers, namely Emerald Online, Taylor and Francis, Elsevier/Science Direct, Springer Link, Sage Publishing and Online. In total, 133 articles published in 62 journals during 1983–2019 were collected. The affinity diagram was applied in order to group the findings of the QM studies into logical themes and these themes into broad categories. Moreover, the Pareto diagram was applied to prioritize the themes revealed.

A plethora of articles focusing on QM in primary and secondary education have been published in the last decades. The findings of the QM studies presented in the 133 reviewed articles are grouped into 43 themes and these themes, in turn, into 6 broad categories, namely management practices, school characteristics, teachers, stakeholders, government and pupils. The analysis also reveals themes that can be characterized as “vital” and “useful.”

Researchers and school managers can take into consideration the findings of the QM studies in primary and secondary education as well as the themes of high priority for the design of future studies and QM implementation plans, respectively.

This is the first literature review study which presents analytically the findings of the QM studies in primary and secondary education. This study also contributes to the literature by formulating meaningful themes of these findings and broad categories of these themes and by prioritizing the themes revealed.