Manufacturing industry has witnessed a gradual transition from being a heuristic-driven labor-intensive set of processes to a sophisticated set of automation and model-driven processes where each operation unit in the production chain is automatically controlled and operated at a preset optimum regime. While incremental improvements in overall manufacturing efficiency have been steered by advan...

This paper presents a model-based approach for competitive analysis of manufacturing plants in the U. S. food processing industry. As part of this approach, plant competitiveness is measured using Operational Competitiveness Ratings Analysis (OCRA) -a new non-parametric method of computing relative inefficiency. Drivers of competitiveness are identified in terms of policies related to plant str...

Reciprocating compressors of the crosshead design have sealing elements around the piston and piston rod. These seals can be of lubricated or nonlubricated design. This paper will give details about our R&D-work for dry running piston rod sealings or packings for high pressure applications. Starting with an overview of packing design some details are given about tribological tests. Measurements...

The manufacturing-marketing (MM) interface has received substantial consideration in the operations management literature; however, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of information systems in facilitating MM integration. As integrated cross-functional systems, enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) are well-suited to provide MM integration. Based on information processin...

The design and management of the manufacturing network for a firm is an important factor for its competitive position. By manufacturing network we mean the plant or plants of a manufacturing firm and the relationships with external suppliers. The way that these operate together is crucial for supporting the competition of the products in the marketplace. This paper presents the results of a sur...

Two separate topics of work are outlined: methods for the measurement of chlorinated monomers in PVC and polychloroprene, and also methods for the measurement of these materials in factory air. Typical results which have been obtained in supplies of raw materials, in finished products, and in the working atmosphere at manufacturing operations are given. The second topic concerns the measurement...

The design and dynamic characterization of a free piston compressor is presented in this paper. The free piston compressor is a proposed device that utilizes combustion to compress air into a high-pressure supply tank. The device is configured such that the transduction from thermal energy to stored energy, in the form of compressed gas, is efficient relative to other small-scale portable power...

PISTON is a machine independent software framework for developing scientiic applications on parallel computers. It presents a consistent data-parallel distributed memory model across a wide range of architectures. It has been implemented on the Fujitsu AP1000 as well as on SIMD and SMP machines. This paper brieey describes the implementation of PISTON on the AP1000 and presents timing results a...

A piston motion controller for a free-piston internal combustion engine is presented. To improve dynamic performance in the control of the piston motion and engine compression ratio, the controller response is determined from a prediction of engine top dead centre error rather than the measured value from the previous cycle. The proposed control approach showed superior performance compared wit...