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The purpose of this paper is to introduce an effective method for two-dimensional inverse heat conduction problems.

The variational iteration method (VIM) is used to solve two-dimensional inverse heat conduction problems and restore boundary conditions in heat conduction.

Numerical results compared with other methods show that the present method is remarkably effective for solving two-dimensional inverse heat conduction problems. This method is a very promoting method, which will be certainly found wide applications.

The VIM is applied to two-dimensional inverse heat conduction problems for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to explore how China uses a social credit system as part of its “data-driven authoritarianism” policy; and second, to investigate how datafication, which is a method to legitimize data collection, and dataveillance, which is continuous surveillance through the use of data, offer the Chinese state a legitimate method of monitoring, surveilling and controlling citizens, businesses and society. Taken together, China’s social credit system is analyzed as an integrated tool for datafication, dataveillance and data-driven authoritarianism.

This study combines the personal narratives of 22 Chinese citizens with policy analyses, online discussions and media reports. The stories were collected using a scenario-based story completion method to understand the participants’ perceptions of the recently introduced social credit system in China.

China’s new social credit system, which turns both online and offline behaviors into a credit score through smartphone apps, creates a “new normal” way of life for Chinese citizens. This data-driven authoritarianism uses data and technology to enhance citizen surveillance. Interactions between individuals, technologies and information emerge from understanding the system as one that provides social goods, using technologies, and raising concerns of privacy, security and collectivity. An integrated critical perspective that incorporates the concepts of datafication and dataveillance enhances a general understanding of how data-driven authoritarianism develops through the social credit system.

This study builds upon an ongoing debate and an emerging body of literature on datafication, dataveillance and digital sociology while filling empirical gaps in the study of the global South. The Chinese social credit system has growing recognition and importance as both a governing tool and a part of everyday datafication and dataveillance processes. Thus, these phenomena necessitate discussion of its consequences for, and applications by, the Chinese state and businesses, as well as affected individuals’ efforts to adapt to the system.

This paper aims to study the anodization of aluminum in a mixture solution of 1,3-propanediol solutions and 0.4 mol l⁻¹ H₃PO₄ at a low temperature.

The morphology and composition of the resulting anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) template was characterized by means of a scanning electron microscope in combination with an energy dispersive spectrometer.

Pore density and pore diameter both were found to be dependent on the temperature of anodization.

The resulting AAO templates exhibited uniform and regular pores with diameters that were significantly smaller than those found in AAO templates anodized at room temperature.

This study aims to simultaneously enhance the load-carrying capacity and control the leakage rate of mechanical seals by optimizing the texture shape.

A multi-objective optimization approach is implemented to determine the optimal “free-form” textures and optimal circular dimples. Experiments are conducted to validate the simulation results.

The experimental coefficient of friction (COF) and leakage rate are in good agreement with the calculated results. In addition, the optimal “free-form” texture shows a lower COF and a lower leakage in most cases.

This work provides a method to optimize the surface texture for a better combination performance of mechanical seals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how subnational institutions within a country explain the performance consequences of open innovation (OI) in emerging market enterprises (EMEs).

The paper conducts a regression analysis by using a novel panel data set comprising of 438 innovative Chinese firms over the period of 2008-2011.

The authors show that although on average openness to external actors improves innovation performance this effect is pronounced for EMEs that operate in subnational regions with a higher level of intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement and of factor market development. The findings point to the context-dependent nature of OI strategy and the complementary effect of institutional parameters in emerging markets and help to reconcile the contrasting findings regarding the effect of OI in the prior literature.

This paper extends the literature on OI by suggesting that the analysis of the performance consequences of OI strategy should go beyond the nexus between OI and firm performance, and instead, focus on subnational-specific institutions, such as region-specific IPR enforcement, factor market development and intermediation market development, that may facilitate or constrain the effect of OI model.

This paper aims to reveal the green governance role played by stock connect in transition economies from the perspective of corporates’ environmental violations and provides implications for the coordination and optimization of subsequent stock market liberalization and green transformation policies in pursuit of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

With the data of Chinese listed enterprises, this paper takes the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect or Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect in China as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) model to identify the impact of stock market liberalization on the corporates’ environmental violations.

The findings reveal that the stock market liberalization significantly restrains the corporates’ environmental violations. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity tests, including excluding two-way effects, adjusting the year of policy implementation, replacing the core variables, introducing the regional fixed effects and excluding the interference effect of other relevant policies during the sample period. Furthermore, the stock market liberalization is beneficial for upgrading information disclosure quality, improving internal governance capability, strengthening environmental protection incentives, and thus restrains corporates’ environmental violations. Meanwhile, heterogeneity tests show that the inhibitory effects are more significant in those grouped samples which is large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden.

We make two marginal contributions to the current literature. First, this paper enriches the literature on the factors influencing corporate environmental violations by focusing on how the macro-level financial policy influences the micro-level corporate environmental violations. One the one hand, prior studies mainly focused on the consequences of corporate environmental violations; however, there is still a puzzle that the effect of stock market liberalization cannot be fully justified to influence corporate environmental violations. The findings help explain this puzzle by examining that stock market liberalization can restrain corporate environmental violations. Moreover, prior studies mainly focused on corporate share price (Yunsen Chen et al., 2022), market liquidity (Han Kim and Singal, 2000), information disclosure (Liang, Lin, and Chin 2012), corporate governance (Bae and Goyal, 2010) and corporate violations (Lingyun Xiong et al., 2021), but not on corporate environmental violations. We assume that the suppression effect of stock market liberalization on corporate environmental violations can help reduce corporate environmental violations, improve corporates’ awareness of environmental compliance. Second, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the literature on stock market liberalization by investigating the restraining effect of Stock Connect on corporate environmental violations from the perspective of information channel, corporate governance channel and motivation channel, which is of practical significance. Moreover, we investigate the differences in the inhibitory effects of stock market liberalization on different enterprises' environmental violations, from firm size, property rights, enterprise assessment results, tax burden to geographical location, which is conducive to the construction of a green financial system and the promotion of sustainable economic development. Our results show that firms which are large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden tend to compliance with environmental laws. These findings emphasize the importance and benefits of Stock Connect.

The reform and opening-up of capital market is valued for promoting sustainable development, while its impact presented as the form of deregulation of short-selling on the green innovation of enterprises in developing countries remains unclear. The purpose of this study is to outline the significance of gradual reform of financial markets in developing countries for low-carbon transformation and provide implications for achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

Based on the green subdivided patent data and financial data of China’s A-share listed companies, this paper takes the implementation of securities margin trading program as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the difference-in-differences (DID) model to examine the impact of deregulation of short-selling constraints on the enterprises’ green transformation.

The findings reveal that the initiating securities margin trading program significantly enhances the green innovation performance of enterprises. These findings are valid after performing a series of robustness tests such as the parallel trend test, the placebo test and the methods to exclude other policy interference. Mechanism analyses demonstrate a two-faceted effect of the securities margin trading program on the green innovation of enterprises, in which short-selling policy increases the pressure on capital market deregulation and meanwhile induces the environmental protection investment. The heterogeneity results demonstrate that the impulsive effect imposed by securities margin trading program is more significant in experimental group samples with characteristics of lower financing constraints, belonging to heavy polluting industries and possessing better environmental supervision capability.

First, previous studies have focused on the impact of financial policies implemented by banking institutions on the green innovation of enterprises, but few literatures have explored the validity of relaxing short-selling restrictions or opening the capital market in the field of enterprise’s green transformation in developing country. From the view of securities market reform, this paper broadens the incentive and supervision effects of the relaxation of short-selling control on enterprise’s green innovation performance after the implementation of securities financing and securities lending policy in China’s capital market. Second, previous studies have explored the impact of command-and-control environmental regulations, as well as market-incentivized environmental regulations such as green finance, low-carbon pilots and environmental tax reform, on the green transition of enterprises. Recently the role of the securities market in the green development of enterprises has received more attention in academia. The pilot of margin financing and securities lending is essentially a market-incentivized regulatory tool, but there is few in-depth research on how it affects the green innovation of enterprises. This paper enriches the research on whether the market incentive financial regulation policy can contribute to the green transformation of enterprises under the Porter hypothesis. Third, some previous studies used the ordinary panel regression model to explore the impact of financial policy on enterprise’s innovation performance. However, due to the potential endogenous problems of the estimated model, it might get biased conclusions. Therefore, based on the method of quasi-natural experiment, this paper selects the margin trading pilot policy as an exogenous shock to solve the endogenous or reverse causality problem in traditional measurement model and applies the DID model to study the relationship between core indicator variables.

This study aims to obtain a design scheme of the surface texture on mechanical seal with lower friction and leakage by comparing two common texture types: dimples and grooves.

An optimal free-form shape and an optimal circular shape were chosen by multi-objective optimization, and two types of grooves with different directions were chosen by a series of experiments. Then, the optimal free-form dimple, the optimal circular dimple, the groove perpendicular to the direction of movement (hereafter called groove-1) and the groove angled at 60° to the direction of movement (hereafter called groove-2) were compared by experiments under different loads.

The optimal free-form dimple shows a better performance in terms of a lower coefficient of friction (COF) and a lower leakage than the other shapes, especially for the high speed and low load conditions. The reduction rate of COF is up to 37.5%, and the leakage rate is reduced by about 12.5%. The dimples have a lower leakage than the grooves. The groove angled at 60° to the direction of movement is easier to pump the oil into the interface of the sealing face, leading to a lower friction but a higher leakage.

This study provides a feasible surface texture design scheme for improving the combination performance of mechanical seals.

Many developing countries have encountered frequent pollution accidents during their rapid development, while the previously weak environmental insurance systems could seriously undermine the progress of sustainable development. Some developing countries like China has initiated and strengthened environmental pollution liability insurance, so how effective this system would be in resolving enterprises environmental risks need to be further revealed.

This research identifies the possible consequence that compulsory environmental pollution liability insurance pilot (CEPLIP) policy would bring to the risk-taking capacity of heavy-polluting corporations of China by the Differences-in-Differences (DID) approach.

The result supports the implementation of CEPLIP policy in increasing corporate risk-taking capacity. Furthermore, the CEPLIP policy can promote the corporate’s risk-taking capacity by reducing financial distress constraints and enhancing trade credit, supporting its dual role of “fallback effect” as well as “external supervision effect” of environmental insurance. As a result of heterogeneity test, the policy is more pronounced in enterprise samples with mature life cycle stage or lower industrial concentration degree. Similarly, it is more significant in enterprise samples owned better environmental management capabilities or greater strategic deviance.

This paper verifies the effectiveness of the CEPLIP policy by strengthening its supervision mechanism and restraining opportunistic behavior tendency and provides implications for alleviating increasing environmental risk pressure and building more sustainable environmental protection management systems.

Disruptions at ports may destroy the planned ship schedules profoundly, which is an imperative operation problem that shipping companies need to overcome. This paper attempts to help shipping companies cope with port disruptions through recovery scheduling.

This paper studies the ship coping strategies for the port disruptions caused by severe weather. A novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is proposed to solve the ship schedule recovery problem (SSRP). A distributionally robust mean conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) optimization model was constructed to handle the SSRP with port disruption uncertainties, for which we derive tractable counterparts under the polyhedral ambiguity sets.

The results show that the size of ambiguity set, confidence level and risk-aversion parameter can significantly affect the optimal values, decision-makers should choose a reasonable parameter combination. Besides, sailing speed adjustment and handling rate adjustment are effective strategies in SSRP but may not be sufficient to recover the schedule; therefore, port skipping and swapping are necessary when multiple or longer disruptions occur at ports.

Since the port disruption is difficult to forecast, we attempt to take the uncertainties into account to achieve more meaningful results. To the best of our knowledge, there is barely a research study focusing on the uncertain port disruptions in the SSRP. Moreover, this is the first paper that applies distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to deal with uncertain port disruptions through the equivalent counterpart of DRO with polyhedral ambiguity set, in which a robust mean-CVaR optimization formulation is adopted as the objective function for a trade-off between the expected total costs and the risk.