This article describes an effective procedure for reducing the water content of excess sludge production from a wastewater treatment plant by increasing its concentration and, as a consequence, minimizing the volume of sludge to be managed. It consists of a pre-dewatering sludge process, which is used as a preliminary step or alternative to the thickening. It is made up of two discontinuous seq...

We study the quasistatic flow of a collection of rigid frictional disks pushed upward (against the gravity) inside a narrow vertical pipe by a compliant mechanism. The contact dynamics method was used for the numerical simulations in combination with a friction law at disk-disk and wall-disk contacts characterized by discontinuous velocity weakening from a static threshold to a dynamic coeffici...

Increasingly organizations compete based on time. As a result, cycle-time reduction is a key agenda for organizations interested in achieving increased customer service and reduced cost. With improved cycle time, organizations can often eliminate or reduce inventory while expanding customer service offerings. The purpose of this tutorial is to present the fundamental concepts of cycle time redu...

Research shows that continuing competitive pressure applied during development and production leads to better industry performance, often at reduced cost. However, the entrenched practice of one-time competition for an entire program life-cycle often endows the winner with a very strong monopolistic power that lasts for decades. This paper describes continuous competition as leverage to acquire...

Estimation of coeecients of partial diierential equations is ill-posed. Output-least-squares method is often used in practice. Convergence of the commonly used minimization algorithms for the inverse problem is often very slow. By using the augmented Lagrangian method, the inverse problem is reduced to a coupled linear algebraic system, which can be solved eeciently. Total variation techniques ...