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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the tribological properties of carbonized polydopamine/reduced graphene oxide (CPDA/rGO) composite coatings.

CPDA/rGO composite coatings were prepared using the spray technique and subsequent pyrolysis under argon. The transmission electron microscopy, field-emission scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy revealed the conversion of PDA and GO into CPDA and rGO, respectively.

The results of tribological investigations show that the CPDA/rGO composite coatings with heat treatment at 300°C possess much better friction-reduction and anti-wear properties.

The worn surfaces of the PDA/GO composite films after heat treatment at 300°C were much smoother than that of the copper substrate. The tribofilms containing C, N, O and Cu played an important role on reducing friction and increasing wear resistance.

This study aims to investigate the impact of environmental responsibility (ER) on consumers' green customization intention (GCI), as well as the separate and joint moderating effects of consumers' negative perceptions and environmental claim type (ECT) on the relationship between ER and GCI.

In this study, two online experimental questionnaires and one between-subject lab experiment were conducted to test all hypotheses.

This study found that high-ER consumers are more likely to choose environmental options in the product customization process (versus low ER). The effect of ER on consumers' GCI is moderated by consumers' negative perceptions of green consumption (e.g. green skepticism and perceived environmental premium (PEP)). Additionally, ECT's joint moderating effect and consumers' negative perception of green customization consumption can be decreased by a substantive (versus associative) claim type in message framing.

The findings provide new insights into the factors affecting consumers' GCIs and have significant practical implications. First, consumers' different ER levels should not be neglected when examining the value of green customization. Second, consumers' green skepticism and PEP could reduce consumers' GCI. Third, the use of substantive environmental claims may also be particularly helpful for companies' communication strategies regarding consumers' low-level negative perceptions of green options.

While previous studies state “environmental responsibility” as a key characteristic of general green consumption, the authors extend that to a green customization process and connect that with consumers' negative perceptions and ECT. In addition, the separate and joint moderating effects of consumers' negative perceptions and ECT were examined. Thus, these findings refine the existing understanding of the relationship between ER and green customization.

This study aims to investigate the interactions between lean production, internal green practices, green product innovation and sustainable performance metrics. The study further looks at the mediation effect of internal green practices and green product innovation between lean production and sustainable performance dimensions.

The questionnaire was used to glean data from 209 manufacturing firms. All the hypothesized relationships were processed by using partial least square-structural equation modelling.

The results suggest that lean production significantly leads to the implementation of internal green practices and the production of quality products with eco-oriented features that meet customers’ needs. Further, while lean production and internal green practices were found to significantly influence sustainability performance, green product innovation significantly influences only financial performance. Besides, the mediation analysis shows that internal green practices mediate the relationship between lean production and sustainable performance dimensions but green product innovation mediates the relationship between lean production and financial performance only.

The study is limited to firms from Ghana, a developing country; hence, the results cannot be imported to reflect other geographical contexts.

The results of the study provide sufficient justifications for managers, (especially Ghanaian managers and those from other similar environs) to commit their financial resources towards implementing lean production and internal green practices so as to achieve sustainability excellence.

This study magnifies and provides new insight on lean and green literature by developing a comprehensive research model that concurrently tests the direct and indirect effects between lean production, internal green practices, green product innovation and sustainable performance dimensions.

Science of the Crowd is a new paradigm. The research on the relationship between provision and requirement arising from the behavior of the crowd under the interconnected environment is a promising topic. This paper aims at studying a new type of interconnected architecture.

This study is a pioneer work on the establishment of a new type of interconnected architecture – rim chain. The rim chain aims at supporting prompt matching between provision and requirements.

The analytical results suggest that requirements can be fulfilled in accordance with six degrees of separation. In other words, the matching between the requirements and provision takes place with six hops in the rim chain framework.

Knowledge graph is used to implement the rim chain.

This paper aims to investigate the long-run financial and environmental performance of corporate green bond issuers, worldwide.

The data includes 259 corporate green bond issuers from 2013 to 2020. The authors adopt the matching approach, using the nearest neighbor method to select the control firms. The event-time approach is used to examine corporate green bond issuers’ long-run stock market performance, and robustness tests are conducted using the calendar-time method. The authors examine green bond issuers’ long-run environmental performance and carbon dioxide (CO₂₎ emissions using difference-in-differences estimations.

In contrast with the earlier long-run event studies, our results reveal that multiple-time issuers, and issuers operating in industries where the natural environment is financially material, perform financially in the long term relative to the control firms. The authors also document that corporate green bond issuers reduce their CO₂ emissions, and improve their resource use efficiency and environmental performance, in the long run.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that looks at the long-run effect of corporate green bond issuance on firms’ stock market performance. It has the particularity to document that corporate green bond issuance is beneficial for investors and positively affects the environment. Our findings help us understand that firms do not issue green bonds for greenwashing.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of urbanization on energy consumption, including economic growth, globalization and “foreign direct investment (FDI)” inflow as control variables.

This study uses yearly panel data from 19071 to 2018 on five selected South Asian economies. It applies the “pooled mean group (PMG)” estimator and the “Dumitrescu-Hurlin (D-H)” panel causality test.

The PMG estimators reveal that urbanization causes energy consumption negatively in the long run because of an unusual and messy urbanization process. At the same time, it has no impact on the latter in the short run. Per capita income has both long- and short-run positive influences on energy use. Globalization causes energy consumption positively in the long run but does not affect it in the short run. FDI inflow has a strong positive impact on energy use in the long run and adverse effects in the short run. The Dumitrescu–Hurlin causality test reveals feedback relationships between “urbanization and energy consumption,” “globalization and energy consumption” and one-way causation from “per capita income to energy consumption.” It validates the findings of the PMG estimators.

The results of this study indicate that South Asia may focus on enhancing the availability of energy in the region and producing more renewable energy to add to its energy portfolio to meet growing energy demand, particularly among urban dwellers. Moreover, they should raise their real per capita incomes and augment the standard of living of low-income city dwellers to make urbanization more serviceable and comfortable.

This study is original. As far as the author is aware, this is a maiden attempt to investigate urbanization's effects on energy usage in South Asia in the preview of globalization and FDI.

Based on the aerodynamic loads and dynamic performances of trains, this study aims to investigate the effect of crosswinds and raindrops on intercity trains operating on viaducts to ensure the safe operation of intercity railways in metropolitan areas.

An approach coupled with the Euler multiphase model as well as the standard k-ɛ turbulence model is used to investigate the coupled flow feature surrounding trains and viaducts, including airflow and raindrops, and the numerical results are validated with those of the wind tunnel test. Additionally, the train’s dynamic response and the operating safety region in different crosswind speeds and rainfall is investigated based on train’s aerodynamic loads and the train wheel–rail dynamics simulation.

The aerodynamic loads of trains at varying running speeds exhibit an increasing trend as the increase of wind speed and rainfall intensity. The motion of raindrop particles demonstrates a significant similarity with the airflow in wind and rain environments, as a result of the dominance of airflow and the supplementary impacts of droplets. As the train’s operating speed ranged between 120 and 200 km/h and within a rainfall range of 20–100 mm/h, the safe operating region of trains decreased by 0.56%–7.03%, compared with the no-rain condition (0 mm/h).

The impact of crosswind speeds and rainfall on the train’s aerodynamic safety is studied, including the flow feature of crosswind and different particle-sized raindrops around the train and viaduct, aerodynamic loads coefficients suffered by the intercity train as well as the operating safety region of intercity trains on the viaduct.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the usefulness of fusion as a means of improving the precision of automated opinion detection.

Five system fusion methods are proposed and tested using runs submitted by the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Blog06 participants as input. The methods include a voting method, an inverse rank method (IRM), a linear‐normalised score method and two weighted methods that use a weighted IRM score to rank the document.

Mean average precision (MAP) is used as an indicator of the performance of the runs in this study. The best system fusion method achieves a 55.5 percent higher MAP result compared with the highest MAP result of any individual run submitted by the Blog06 participants. This equates to an increase in detection of 2,398 relevant opinion documents (21 percent).

System fusion can be used to improve upon the results achieved by existing individual opinion detection systems. On the other hand, multiple opinion detection approaches can be combined into one system and fusion used to combine the results to build in diversity. Diversity within fusion inputs can increase the improvements achieved by fusion methods. The improved output from a diverse opinion detection system will then contain a higher number of relevant documents and reduce the incidence of high‐ranking non‐relevant documents and low‐ranking relevant documents.

The fusion methods proposed in this study demonstrate that simple fusion of opinion detection systems can improve performance.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of MoS₂ on the microstructure and characteristics of micro-arc oxidized (MAO) ceramic coatings created on ZK60 magnesium alloy through the addition of varying concentrations of MoS₂ particles to the electrolyte, aiming to enhance the corrosion resistance of magnesium alloy.

The surface morphology, roughness and phase composition of the coatings were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy, a hand-held roughness tester and an X-ray diffractometer, respectively, and the corrosion resistance of the MAO coatings prepared by the addition of different contents of MoS₂ particles was tested and analyzed using an electrochemical workstation.

The results demonstrate that MoS₂/MgO composite coatings have been successfully prepared on the surface of magnesium alloys through micro-arc oxidation. Furthermore, the corrosion resistance of the ZK60 magnesium alloy prepared with the addition of 1.0 g/L MoS₂ was the best compared to the other samples.

MoS₂ particles were able to penetrate the coatings successfully during the micro-arc oxidation process, acting as a barrier in the micropores to prevent the corrosion medium from touching the surface, thus improving the corrosion resistance of the sample. The electrochemical workstation was used to study the corrosion resistance of the MoS₂/MAO coating on the ZK60 magnesium alloy.

This study aims to examine the impact of some real variables such as real effective exchange rates, real mortgage rates, real money supply, real construction cost index and housing sales on the real housing prices.

This study uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model in the monthly period of 2010:1–2021:10.

The real effective exchange rate has a positive and symmetric effect. The decreasing effect of negative changes in real money supply on real housing prices is higher than the increasing effect of positive changes. Only positive changes in the real construction cost index have an increasing and statistically significant effect on real house prices, while only negative changes in housing sales have a small negative sign and a small increasing effect on housing prices. The fact that the positive and negative changes in real mortgage rates are negative and positive, respectively, indicates that both have a reducing effect on real housing prices.

This study suggests the first NARDL model that investigates the asymmetric effects on real housing prices instead of nominal housing prices for Turkey. In addition, the study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to examine the effects of the five real variables on real housing prices.