Serviceable engineering components not only rely on their bulk material properties but also on the design and the characteristics of their surface. These characteristics influence directly the surface quality of the machined products. In terms of surface roughness, the influence of the tool material can be also caused by its tribological properties, i.e. a contact behavior between cutting tool and workpiece. This study presents a formulation of the nominal’s coefficient and friction forces generated in machining between workpiece and cutting tool using cutting force profiles. The obtained equations led to the evaluation of coefficient, frictional forces and cutting inserts characterization in terms of better surface finish and lowest frictional forces. Indeed, results show that the contact between cutting tool and workpiece depends on the materials cutting tool nature, and that the cutting tool type can influences the surface roughness of the machined surface.

Customer Demand Information (CDI) sharing plays a vital role in reducing the bullwhip effect as well as in improving the performance of a supply chain. The objective of the present research is to identify the best form of CDI sharing experimentally for a four-stage serial supply chain under lost sales business environment. A supply chain role play game software package is developed for conducting suitable experiments. Different forms of CDI sharing tested in this research are periodic CDI, history of CDI and CDI in the form of distribution. It is found that all forms of CDI sharing have significant impact on the reduction of bullwhip effect compared to non-sharing of information and the upstream stages in the supply chain are benefited the most under CDI sharing. The statistical analysis also confirms that sharing CDI in the form of distribution is the most effective among the various forms of information sharing studied. The percentage reductions in magnitude of order variance under the most benefitted information sharing at distributor and factory stages are 64.43 and 66.04, respectively. It is also found that the performance of a supply chain depends on the degree of customer demand information shared among the stages in the supply chain.

The linear governing equations of a micropolar thermoelastic medium without energy dissipation are solved for surface wave solutions. The appropriate solutions satisfying the radiation conditions are applied to the required boundary conditions at the free surface of the half-space of the medium. A frequency equation is obtained for Rayleigh wave in the medium. The non-dimensional speed of the propagation of Rayleigh wave is computed for a specific model of the material and are shown graphically against frequency and non-dimensional parameter.

This article provides a method of acoustic emission (AE) technique to detect leakage in pipeline and locate the position of the leakage. The AE sensor is made of piezoelectric effect transducer to pick up the acoustic emission signal which is generated from the turbulent flow at the leak position. The signal conditioning unit is used to enhanced and eliminate the background noise from the leak location sources. The main acoustic emission processing unit is used to acquire and process the extracted AE characteristic parameters from preprocessing waveform. The leak pipeline is simulated by drilling the hole and plugged with M8 screw at different locations. The results show that the proposed AE method can detect and locate simultaneous leak condition in pipeline with promising results.

Export is the backbone of business development in any industry and it plays essential role on the success of organizations. The objective of this study is to determine factors influencing on food industry for development of export activities. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 247 randomly selected experts who were active in production of foods in city of Tehran, Iran. Using principle component analysis based on varimax rotation, the study detects six factors including social opportunities, international opportunities, customer orientation, business opportunities, new technologies, organizational capabilities, commercialization of ideas on the development of export markets.

Organizational performance is influenced by several factors including electronic services. In fact, electronic services play essential role on the performance of organizations with significant number of clients. The objective of this study is to determine factors influencing on intention to use electronic services on organizational performance in social service organization in Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 231 randomly selected employees who worked for social security organization in city of Tehran, Iran. Using principle component analysis using varimax rotation, the study determines six factors including culture, communication, customer, employee engagement, learning organization, service management, and usefulness of application, which influence the most on organizational performance.

This paper presents an analytical and a numerical thermomechanical investigation of a thick-walled cylinder made of the functionally graded materials (FGMs). The hollow cylinder is subjected to a pressure and a thermal load and the properties of this material are varying across the thickness from the inner face that is a ceramic to the outer one which is a metal. After validating the current results by the analytical results, the thermomechanical behavior of the cylinder in the transient condition is investigated and the hoop and radial stresses and also temperature distribution are reported. The results reveal that the use of FG material causes a decrease in the stress; thus, it significantly improves thermomechanical behavior of the domain, thanks to using FG materials.

The objective of this study is to develop of an inventory policy for deteriorating items, in which demand for the products is stock dependent and the retailer invests in preservation technology to reduce the rate of product deterioration. In many real-life situations, for certain types of consumer goods, the consumption rate is sometimes influenced by the stock-level. It is usually observed that a large pile of goods on a shelf in a supermarket will lead the customer to buy more and then generate higher demand. The consumption rate may go up or down with the on-hand stock level. This paper is developed with the realistic conditions of demand, allowable credit period, partial backlogging and variable ordering cost. A solution procedure is given to find the optimal preservation technology cost and total cost of the system. A numerical example and sensitivity analysis are presented to illustrate the model.

Decision support system (DSS) normally consists of a set of related computer programs and the data required to help with analysis and decision-making within an organization. Many software vendors claim their decision support, analytics or business intelligence applications may provide a competitive advantage by providing different facilities such as business intelligence tools, business performance management software, data mining tools, etc. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine different DSS factors influencing on development of export activities on selected firms which are active in Tehran Stock Exchange. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 35 questions and distributes it among 211 randomly selected managers who were involved in export activities. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.817, which is well above the minimum desirable level. Using principle component analysis, the study has detected five factors including internal resources, management approach, quality of data, efficiency of data and organizational approach, which influence the most on export activities.