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The purpose of this paper is to study the influence mechanism of different levels of social capital (Structure holes–local network attributes and indirect ties–global network attributes) and organizational culture on the creativity of key inventors, and the role of organizational culture between social capital and creativity.

The paper tested the hypotheses with a sample of patent data accumulated from 46 firms in Chinese electronic information and automobile sectors. Negative binomial regression was used to explore the factors influencing the creativity of key inventors.

The paper discovers that structural holes are valuable social capital for the creativity of key inventors and very important in firms with a collective and conservative culture. Moreover, it also locates that key inventor are more creative in firms with an individualistic and competitive culture than those in firms with a collective and conservative culture.

This study emphasizes the influence of social capital on creativity and contributes to R&D management. It highlights structural holes are certainly important to key inventors in a collective and conservative culture, thus contradicting preceding studies that locate structural holes useful solely in an individualistic culture. This finding broadens our knowledge of the benefits of this network structure. Also, this debate challenges several basic views on structural holes currently.

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

This paper aims to explore the impact of a firm’s political connections on its economic value added (EVA) performance while treating connection heterogeneity and product diversification as moderators.

Based on data collected from 1,143 Chinese manufacturing listed firms in China’s A-share market from 2012 to 2017, this study conducted panel data analysis to investigate proposed relationships.

The findings provide evidence that political connections promote EVA performance of enterprises and both connection heterogeneity and product diversification negatively moderate the political connections – EVA performance relationship.

Drawing sights from the resource-based view, this study investigates the influence of corporate political connections on EVA performance, considering contingent factors of connection heterogeneity and corporate strategy (i.e. product diversification). It, thus, contributes to the literature on political connections by providing additional evidence to explaining the inconclusive findings on the political connections–firm performance relationship and extending prior research by emphasizing the moderating roles of connection heterogeneity and corporate strategy. It also complements prior research on EVA performance by exploring its antecedents.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence mechanism of different interface component surface textures on the ultrasonic motor (USM) output performance.

The energy transmission mechanism of the traveling-wave ultrasonic motor 60 (TRUM-60) was numerically and experimentally investigated by fabricating dimple textures with different feature types on the friction material and the stator.

Textured friction material can increase the contact range effectively, and thus, can improve the friction characteristics of the interface and the output performance of the TRUM-60. The experimental results verified the expected influence mechanism and demonstrated that the use of either a textured friction material or stator has a very different effect on USM output performance. A textured PI-based friction material improved the TRUM-60 output performance, resulting in a maximum energy conversion efficiency of 57.11%. However, a textured stator degraded the TRUM-60 output performance, resulting in a minimum energy conversion efficiency of only 44.92%.

The results of this study provide a theoretical foundation for improved USM designs with textured interfaces.

The study aims to examine the effects of guanxi and harmonious leadership on acquisition performance and the role of sociocultural integration as a mediating mechanism impacting the above links, with a focus on Chinese cross-border acquisitions in The Netherlands.

Data were collected through survey questionnaire with 91 respondents who work in Dutch-acquired companies. Regression analysis was used for exploring the relationship.

The study finds that both guanxi and harmonious leadership are positive to acquisition performance, and sociocultural integration represents a significant mediating mechanism by which guanxi and harmonious leadership can result in improved acquisition performance.

This study contributes to culture research by emphasizing the clarification of specific Chinese cultural values and cultural practices in cross-border acquisitions and examining the role of guanxi and harmonious leadership in acquisition performance. Meanwhile, this study helps to unveil Chinese cross-border acquisitions in The Netherlands by examining the mediating force – sociocultural integration.

Epoxy resin (EP) is a kind of thermosetting resin, and its application is usually limited by poor toughness. In this case, a type of new flexible chain blocking hyperbranched polyester (HBP) was designed and synthesized. The purpose of this study is to enhance the toughness and dielectric properties of EP.

P-toluene sulfonic acid was used as the catalyst, with dimethy propionic acid as the branch unit and pentaerythritol as the core in the experiment. Then, n-hexanoic acid and n-caprylic acid were, respectively, put to gain HBP with a n-hexanoic acid and n-caprylic acid capped structure. The microstructure, mechanical properties, insulation properties and dielectric properties of the composite were characterized for the purpose of finding the appropriate proportion of HBP.

HBP enhanced the toughness of epoxy-cured products by interpenetrating polymer network structure between the flexible chain of HBP and the EP molecular chain. Meanwhile, HBP reduced the ε and tgδ of the epoxy anhydride-cured product by reducing the number of polar groups per unit volume of the EP through free volumes.

Yet EP is a kind of thermosetting resin, which is widely used in coating, aerospace, electronics, polymer composites and military fields, but it is usually limited by poor toughness. In a word, it is an urgent priority to develop new EP with better toughness and mechanical properties.

At present, HBP has been applied as a new kind of toughening strategy and as a modifier for EP. According to the toughening mechanism of HBP modified EP, the free volume of HBP creates a space for the EP molecule to move around when loaded. Moreover, the free volume could cause the dielectric constant of EP to diminish by reducing the content of polarizable groups. Meanwhile, the addition of HBP with flexible chains grafted to the EP could develop an interpenetrating network structure, thus further enhancing the toughness of EP

With the advent of the era of Big Data, the scale of knowledge graph (KG) in various domains is growing rapidly, which holds huge amount of knowledge surely benefiting the question answering (QA) research. However, the KG, which is always constituted of entities and relations, is structurally inconsistent with the natural language query. Thus, the QA system based on KG is still faced with difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to answer the domain-specific questions based on KG, providing conveniences for the information query over domain KG.

The authors propose a method FactQA to answer the factual questions about specific domain. A series of logical rules are designed to transform the factual questions into the triples, in order to solve the structural inconsistency between the user’s question and the domain knowledge. Then, the query expansion strategies and filtering strategies are proposed from two levels (i.e. words and triples in the question). For matching the question with domain knowledge, not only the similarity values between the words in the question and the resources in the domain knowledge but also the tag information of these words is considered. And the tag information is obtained by parsing the question using Stanford CoreNLP. In this paper, the KG in metallic materials domain is used to illustrate the FactQA method.

The designed logical rules have time stability for transforming the factual questions into the triples. Additionally, after filtering the synonym expansion results of the words in the question, the expansion quality of the triple representation of the question is improved. The tag information of the words in the question is considered in the process of data matching, which could help to filter out the wrong matches.

Although the FactQA is proposed for domain-specific QA, it can also be applied to any other domain besides metallic materials domain. For a question that cannot be answered, FactQA would generate a new related question to answer, providing as much as possible the user with the information they probably need. The FactQA could facilitate the user’s information query based on the emerging KG.

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.

This study aims to develop a facile ligand-exchange strategy to promote nano-sintering of oleylamine (OAM)-capped silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). By using ligand exchange process with NH₄OH to remove OAM from the surface of AgNP, this study reports effectively reducing the sintering temperature of AgNPs to achieve low-temperature nano-sintering. Compared with untreated AgNPs of OAM-capped, NH₄OH-treated AgNPs possess superior sintering performance that could be applied to a fractional generator device as conductor and in favour of the fabrication of flexible circuit modules.

First, oleylamine is used as reductant to synthesize monodisperse AgNPs by a simple one-step method. Then ligand exchange is used with NH₄OH at different treating times to remove OAM, and micro-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and contact angle test are applied to clear the mechanism and structure characteristics of these processes. Finally, NH₄OH-treated AgNPs sediment sintering is used at different temperatures to test electrical resistivity and use ex situ scanning electron microscopy combined with in situ X-ray diffraction to study changes in microstructure in the whole nano-sintering process.

The AgNPs are always capped by organic ligands to prevent nanoparticles agglomeration. And oleylamine used as reductant could synthesize desirable size distributions of 8–32 nm with monodisperse globular shapes, but the low-temperature nano-sintering seemed not to be achieved by the oleylamine-capped AgNPs because OAM is an organic with long C-chain. The ligand exchange approach was enabled to replace the original organic ligands capped on AgNPs with organic ligands of low thermal stability which could promote nano-sintering. After ligand exchange treated AgNPs could be sintered on photo paper, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and polyethylene terephthalate flexible substrates at low temperature.

In this research, the method ligand exchange is used to change the ligand of AgNPs. During ligand exchange, NH₄OH was used to treat AgNPs. Through the treatment of NH₄OH, the change of hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties of AgNPs was successfully realized. The sintering temperature of AgNPs can also be reduced and the properties can be improved. Finally, the applicability of the AgNPs sediment with this nano-sintering process at low temperature for obtaining conductive patterns was evaluated using PDMS as substrates.

Examines the fifteenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.