The microstructure of steel is decisive for its chemical, physical and mechanical properties. Depending on the parameters characterising liquid metal as well as the parameters of the steel casting influencing the crystallisation process, the macrostructure of casts and ingots consist of three, two or only one crystallisation zone. In steel ingots, its most frequent by consist of three zones: ch...

The Steel Founders’ Society regularly surveys member companies to determine the typical practices used in steel casting production. SFSA has also promoted the participation of member companies in the Performance Benchmarking survey available each year to members of participating manufacturing associations. It is useful to take a look across the results of the past several years and to reflect o...

A new business concept that offers products and services in a different way of traditional product-sales businesses is getting more attention especially in manufacturing industries. This paper investigates how this new business by means of integration of products and services is achieved in Germany and Italy. In addition, it analyzes the differences according to the company sizes. The results i...

s teel industries play a key role in the national economy and welfare of the society in many steel manufacturer countries. it is found that manufacturing and consuming of steel products would be a key indicator to measure and evaluate economic and industrial performance of a country. nowadays, countries with the large natural oil and gas resources (e.g. iran) attempt to select an alternative ec...

In this paper, a fracto-metallographic analysis was performed on the cracked specimens of cold drawn pearlitic steel subjected to fatigue tests. Fatigue cracks are transcollonial and exhibit a preference for fracturing pearlitic lamellae, with non-uniform crack opening displacement values, micro-discontinuities, branchings, bifurcations and frequent local deflections that create microstructural...

The aim of this paper is to provide organisational knowledge management teams with a new framework for assessing the performance of communities of practice (CoPs) in terms of efficiency by analysing trends of their efficiency changes. This paper uses the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to analyse the knowledge sharing activities in CoPs, and classify CoPs into five types based on the tre...

This paper critically examines the debate on corporate governance and the claim (often made in Anglo-American companies) that the close links between German banks and industry are primarily responsible for the longer-term investment strategies and greater quality competitiveness of German manufacturing. Instead, it is argued here that manufacturing investment and bank behavior must be examined ...

Linear programming is one of the frequently applied tools in supply chain management. However, managers and decision makers may lack information about exact values of most of the parameters used in the optimization models. Fortunately, fuzzy linear programming comes up with a powerful tool to deal with this kind of incomplete data. In this paper, the flexible approach of fuzzy linear programmin...

In the heavy manufacturing industry, strength, resilience, and reliability are vital characteristics in products. In the early 1990s, Caterpillar developed a research plan to apply functionally gradient material (FGM) coatings onto wear parts in a cost-effective manner so that the coated parts would last several times longer than parts currently available. By spraying a series of coatings desig...

BACKGROUND During the past decade, incidence of asthma has increased, which might have been due to environmental exposures. OBJECTIVES Considering the expansion of cable manufacturing industry in Iran, the present study was conducted to evaluate the prevalence of occupational asthma in a cable manufacturing company in Iran as well as its related factors. PATIENTS AND METHODS This study was ...