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There is a continuous drive in automotive sector to shift from conventional lubricants to environmental friendly ones without adversely affecting critical tribological performance parameters. Because of their favorable tribological properties, chemically modified vegetable oils such as palm trimethylolpropane ester (TMP) are one of the potential candidates for the said role. To prove the suitability of TMP for applications involving boundary-lubrication regime such as cam/tappet interface of direct acting valve train system, a logical step forward is to investigate their compatibility with conventional lubricant additives.

In this study, extreme pressure and tribological characteristics of TMP, formulated with glycerol mono-oleate (GMO), molybdenum dithiocarbamate (MoDTC) and zinc dialkyldithiophosphate (ZDDP), has been investigated using four-ball wear tester and valve train test rig. For comparison, additive-free and formulated versions of polyalphaolefin (PAO) were used as reference. Moreover, various surface characterization techniques were deployed to investigate mechanisms responsible for a particular tribological behavior.

In additive-free form, TMP demonstrated better extreme pressure characteristics compared to PAO and lubricant additives which are actually optimized for conventional base-oils such as PAO, are also proved to be compatible with TMP to some extent, especially ZDDP. During cylinder head tests, additive-free TMP proved to be more effective compared to PAO in reducing friction of cam/tappet interface, but opposite behavior was seen when formulated lubricants were used. Therefore, there is a need to synthesize specialized friction modifiers, anti-wear and extreme pressure additives for TMP before using it as engine lubricant base-oil.

In this study, additive-free and formulated versions of bio-lubricant are tested for cam/tappet interface of direct acting valve train system of commercial passenger car diesel engine for the very test time. Another important aspect of this research was comparison of important tribological performance parameters (friction torque, wear, rotational speed of tappet) of TMP-based lubricants with conventional lubricant base oil, that is, PAO and its formulated version.

Depleting reserves of crude oils and their adverse environmental effects have shifted focus toward environment friendly and biobased lubricant base oils. Natural oils and fats act as good lubricants but they have low oxidation and thermal stability which makes them unsuitable for modern day uses. This paper aims to produce trimethylolpropane ester biolubricant from cottonseed oil and study the effects of its use in spark ignition (SI) engines.

In this work, cottonseed oil is converted to TMP lubricant by a two-step based catalyzed esterification. The lubricants thermophysical properties are then analyzed and a 20% blend with synthetic poly-alpha olefin is used in an spark ignition engine.

The produced lubricant has viscosity @100^oC of 4.91 cSt, a viscosity index of 230 and a flash point of 202^oC. When used as a 20% blend in a petrol engine, the rate of oil deterioration was reduced by 18%, however, the overall wear increased by 6.7%. However, this increase is offset by its improved environmental impacts.

In its current state, such a biolubricant can be used as an additive to most commercially available lubricants to improve oil deterioration characteristics and environmental impact. However, further work on improving biolubricant’s wear characteristics is needed for the complete replacement of mineral oil-based lubricants.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of engine operating conditions and lubricant friction modifier on direct acting tappet rotation. In this research work, novel method of measuring engine tappet rotation speed has been developed. The technique is so novel. It allows the measurement on real production engine with no modification to the engine tappet bore. Also, In this paper, the effect of engine operating conditions and the effectiveness of friction modifier on tappet rotation is reported.

For the very first time, for the purpose of measuring follower rotation in a real production engine, a 4 × 6 mm2 electronic chip called Gradiometer is mounted outside the tappet housing, allowing the monitoring of tappet rotation speed without the need to machine a hole in the tappet bore. This novel technique is adopted on Mercedes Benz OM464 engine to study the effect of engine conditions and lubricant chemistry on tappet performance.

The main outcome of this research work is the development of novel method of measuring tappet rotation. Also, during the experiments, it was revealed that although friction modifiers help in reducing friction at the cam/tappet interface, they can also adversely affect the tappet rotation speed.

The novel technique developed in the research work is one of the most cost effective and simple to use. Researches can adopt the technique to study the tribological performance of direct acting tappet on real production engine. Researches acknowledge the effectiveness of friction modifiers in valve train but its effect on rotation which plays a key role in the component durability has not been the focus of most of the researches mainly due to lack of effective techniques.

This paper highlights how biological waste materials can be used for generating the much needed energy and obtaining nutrient-rich compost for agriculture through anaerobic digestion (AD). The paper further highlights the importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in using AD for converting waste to energy (WTE), leading to many environmental benefits as well as clean energy generation. It would help to reduce pollution, water acidification and carbon emissions that eventually lead to climate change.

The researchers undertook an in-depth study to highlight the role played by an SME in converting WTE and helping towards achieving circularity. An exploratory case-based approach was used to understand value leakage for an AD plant operating on WTE principles in the UK. The plant is still currently active, and it is located in the Midlands, England. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were undertaken with different stakeholders.

This paper reveals the importance of WTE and the significant role played by AD in converting food waste into useful matter. It reports further into the value leakage issue faced in the AD plants. It demonstrates the importance of technological innovation in SME to capture value leakages in a circular model. Most importantly, it demonstrates how SMEs gain competitive advantage and generate value proposition, while they aim for zero waste to landfill objective.

The research involves a case study based on an SME, operating on a circular business model. It will be worth investigating how other businesses could gain competitive advantage. For SMEs interested in AD for WTE, this paper introduces further technological innovation to the AD process to leverage further potential for reuse of waste liquid. Any SMEs entering WTE market ought to take into consideration such design implications.

The paper reveals how the use of waste by SMEs would lead to many environmental benefits as well as clean energy generation. It would help to reduce pollution, water acidification and carbon emissions that eventually lead to climate change. It is useful for addressing the needs of waste food producers and is a cheap raw material for generating energy. The benefits to the public are that it reduces the need for landfill and increases recycling.

The WTE is an effective way of making use of last-stage waste.

Despite SMEs being the powerhouse of the European economies, there is limited research investigating how circular economy (CE) could unlock their potential. Moreover, development of AD in the UK has lagged behind other EU countries. We highlight value leakages and argue how technological innovation should be used to close the value chain loop in the WTE production process. This paper, therefore, demonstrates the important role of an AD process, which involves decomposition of biodegradable materials. It shows that AD is an economically viable and environmentally friendly process of obtaining clean energy at low cost.

This study aims to explore the mediating effect of organization culture (OC) in the influence of emotional intelligence on the high-performance leadership of Chinese woman leaders.

A quantitative study to analyze survey data from 290 women leaders in the Ning Xia Hui Autonomies Region private and public sectors based in Northwest China.

The results indicate that emotional intelligence has a positive influence on woman leadership performance in China. woman leaders with higher emotional intelligence may have higher leadership performance. Further, emotional intelligence positively influences organization culture; OC also positively influences high-performance leadership. And the study also indicates OC mediates the relationship between emotional intelligence and woman leaders’ high-performance leadership in China, which means that OC promote and reinforce the relationships between emotional intelligence and high-performance leadership in China. Therefore, organizations should pay more attention to the construction of OC to help Chinese woman leaders and organizations succeed.

This study may catalyze positive social change in leadership development and management by helping women leaders implement effective leadership performance in a complex and global workforce. And to help women leaders increase their understanding of emotional intelligence, OC and its influence has on their performance. The proposed model of this study may help Chinese leaders put emotional intelligence, OC and high-performance leadership of woman leaders into a careful and integrated consideration. Professionals could use these results as a catalyst to develop a set of management plans and career development plans to improve woman’s understanding of the relationship between leadership performance and emotional intelligence. OC is critical to help women leaders present an effective leadership performance. Hence, this study may help women leaders successfully get more opportunities for growth and promotion in the organization.

Through the first-hand verification of organization culture, this study provides an essential theoretical and background contribution to the impact of emotional intelligence of woman leaders on high-performance leadership. In addition, the study also has forward-looking thinking, that is, the second-order reflection-reflection model of OC and high-performance leadership of woman leaders, which will provide a new vision for variance-based partial least squares-structural equation modeling.

This study aims to use a qualitative approach to explore and clarify the mechanism by which heuristic-driven biases influence the decisions and performance of individual investors actively trading on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). It also aims to identify how to overcome the negative effect of heuristic-driven biases, so that finance practitioners can avoid the expensive errors which they cause.

This study adopts an interpretative approach. Qualitative data was collected in semistructured interviews, in which the target population was asked open-ended questions. The sample consists of five brokers and/or investment strategists/advisors who maintain investors’ accounts or provide investment advice to investors on the PSX, who were selected on a convenient basis. The researchers analyzed the interview data thematically.

The results confirm that investors often use heuristics, causing several heuristic-driven biases when trading on the stock market, specifically, reliance on recognition-based heuristics, namely, alphabetical ordering of firm names, name memorability and name fluency, as well as cognitive heuristics, such as herding behavior, disposition effect, anchoring and adjustment, repetitiveness, overconfidence and availability biases. These lead investors to make suboptimal decisions relating to their investment management activities. Due to these heuristic-driven biases, investors trade excessively in the stock market, and their investment performance is adversely affected.

This study provides a practical framework to explore and clarify the mechanism by which heuristic-driven biases influence investment management activities. To the best of authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first to focus on links between heuristic-driven biases, investment decisions and performance using a qualitative approach. Furthermore, with the help of a qualitative approach, the investigators also highlight some factors causing an increased use of heuristic variables by investors and discuss practical approaches to overcoming the negative effects of heuristics factors, so that finance practitioners can avoid repeating the expensive errors which they cause, which also differentiates this study from others.

This article aims to systematically review the literature published in recognized journals focused on cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their effect on investment management activities and market efficiency. It also includes some of the research work on the origins and foundations of behavioral finance, and how this has grown substantially to become an established and particular subject of study in its own right. The study also aims to provide future direction to the researchers working in this field.

For doing research synthesis, a systematic literature review (SLR) approach was applied considering research studies published within the time period, i.e. 1970–2021. This study attempted to accomplish a critical review of 176 studies out of 256 studies identified, which were published in reputable journals to synthesize the existing literature in the behavioral finance domain-related explicitly to cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their effect on investment management activities and market efficiency as well as on the origins and foundations of behavioral finance.

This review reveals that investors often use cognitive heuristics to reduce the risk of losses in uncertain situations, but that leads to errors in judgment; as a result, investors make irrational decisions, which may cause the market to overreact or underreact – in both situations, the market becomes inefficient. Overall, the literature demonstrates that there is currently no consensus on the usefulness of cognitive heuristics in the context of investment management activities and market efficiency. Therefore, a lack of consensus about this topic suggests that further studies may bring relevant contributions to the literature. Based on the gaps analysis, three major categories of gaps, namely theoretical and methodological gaps, and contextual gaps, are found, where research is needed.

The skillful understanding and knowledge of the cognitive heuristic-driven biases will help the investors, financial institutions and policymakers to overcome the adverse effect of these behavioral biases in the stock market. This article provides a detailed explanation of cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their influence on investment management activities and market efficiency, which could be very useful for finance practitioners, such as an investor who plays at the stock exchange, a portfolio manager, a financial strategist/advisor in an investment firm, a financial planner, an investment banker, a trader/broker at the stock exchange or a financial analyst. But most importantly, the term also includes all those persons who manage corporate entities and are responsible for making their financial management strategies.

Currently, no recent study exists, which reviews and evaluates the empirical research on cognitive heuristic-driven biases displayed by investors. The current study is original in discussing the role of cognitive heuristic-driven biases in investment management activities and market efficiency as well as the history and foundations of behavioral finance by means of research synthesis. This paper is useful to researchers, academicians, policymakers and those working in the area of behavioral finance in understanding the role that cognitive heuristic plays in investment management activities and market efficiency.

This study systematically explores the patterns and connections in the behavioural bias and investment decisions of the existing literature in the Scopus database published between 2007 and 2022. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

In the article it was determined which contributed documents were the most significant in this particular subject area along with the citations, publications and nations that were associated with them. The bibliographic coupling offered more in-depth insights into the papers by organizing them into distinct groups. The pattern of the publications has been brought to light, and the connection between different types of literature has provided insight into the path that future studies should take.

This study considered only articles from the Scopus database. Future studies can be based on papers that have been published in other databases.

The outcome of this study provides valuable insights into the intellectual structure and biases of investors and adds value to existing knowledge. This review provides a road map for the future trend of research on behavioural bias and investment decisions.

Entrepreneurship is an important paradigm for enhancing the economic well-being of nations. However, despite heated debate about the significant role of entrepreneurial education (EE) in developing favourable entrepreneurial intention (EI), little is known about the role of individuals’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ES), entrepreneurial motivation (EM) and family support (FS), which the authors investigated in this study.

This study has used a quantitative research design to collect data from 334 young people from various Malaysian higher education institutes using a purposive sampling technique and a deductive approach based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB).

The findings revealed interesting insights into the criticality of young people’s ES, EM and FS in learning methods, techniques and skills to start new enterprises. Moreover, EE was a significant mediator of the relationship between individual self-efficacy, FS, EM and EI.

This study is among the few to contribute to strategic management scholarship by designing a framework based on the idea that EE relies on diverse factors, particularly ES, EM and FS. These factors encourage Malaysian young people to seek the necessary education to develop favourable EI and launch successful businesses.

Rural areas are one of the effective regions in economy and self-sufficiency field especially in agricultural and livestock section. Planning in the rural section and the effort in solving the problems of farmers lead to increase their interest in farming and manufacturing in the villages and decrease their migration to the cities and metropolitans. Therefore, the present study aimed at feasibility of electricity to a rural household in Iran using off-grid solar-based hybrid system.

In renewable energy projects, a successful evaluation requires suitable criteria so that one can properly analyze the operational behavior of all feasible scenarios. In the present paper, HOMER software has been used for this purpose for a village with no access to electricity grid (Bar Aftab-e Jalaleh, Iran). Due to drastic fluctuation of fossil fuel prices and varied solar radiations in various years because of climate change, sensitivity analysis has been performed using HOMER.

In the optimum status economically, 70% of needed energy is provided by solar cells at the price 0.792 $/kWh. The comparison between the optimum condition economically and the condition that only use fossil fuels revealed that the return on investment will occur after less than 2 years and have remained profitable over 23 years.

The authors hope that the results of this study can be used in planning of the authorities to realize the interests of people in this village.

According to the surveys, despite Iran being the first country in terms of providing solar power to the villages, so far no socio-economic-environmental assessment has been done for a solar cell-based micro-grid in an off-grid mode for a remote village that is deprived of electricity from a national electricity grid. In addition, for the first time in Iran, the effect of the fuel price and solar radiation parameters variability on the performance of system have been investigated.