Green and lean paradigms have been adopted by companies in order to manage their relationships with suppliers in a supply chain management context, but nearly always separately and with little understanding of their influence on company performance. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of the influence of green and lean upstream supply chain management practices on the sustainable development of businesses. To attend this objective, a set of performance measures covering economic (operational cost, environmental cost, and inventory cost), environmental (business wastage, green image, and CO 2 emission), and social (corruption risk, supplier screening and local supplier) perspectives is proposed. An explanatory case study was conducted at a Portuguese automaker to test qualitatively the validity of the proposed theoretical framework. From the case study, a model is suggested, which encompasses the relationships between green and lean upstream supply chain practices and sustainable business development.

Herein we describe the design and the assembly of temperature sensitive polysulfone (PS)/polyacrylonitrile (PAN) blend membranes using supercritical fluid technology. Blended membranes were prepared using the CO2-assisted phase inversion method, and their pores were coated with two thermoresponsive hydrogels-poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAAm) and poly(N,N′-diethylacrylamide) (PDEAAm). Permeation experiments of bovine serum albumin (BSA) and lysozyme (LYS) solutions were used to evaluate the performance and temperature-responsive behavior of coated membranes. While membranes coated with PNIPAAm presented similar protein permeation profiles at temperatures below and above its lower critical solution temperature, PDEAAm coating imparted a temperature-responsive behavior to PS/PAN (90:10) membranes and selective permeation of proteins with different sizes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The main objective of this paper is to propose an index to assess the agility and leanness of individual companies and the corresponding supply chain. The index is named Agilean and is obtained from a set of Agile and Lean supply chain practices integrated in an assessment model. The Delphi technique is used to develop a series of weighted Agile and Lean {SCM} practices and also the importance of paradigms through experts in automotive research topics. As a way to illustrate the application of the index and find out if it returns return meaningful values, a case study is presented. The case study results confirm the quite easy applicability of the suggested Agilean index in a supply chain real-world setting. This index makes it possible to assess the companies and corresponding supply chain Agile and Lean behaviour, which is translated into an index score to compare competing companies and supply chains.

The potential advantage of using superconducting materials in electrical devices is well described in the literature. The electromagnetic properties of these materials make them unique for several applications, such as, e.g. electrical machines and drives, fault current applications, or superconducting magnetic energy storage. In the development of electromechanical conversion devices, superconducting materials are used foreseeing mainly a decrease in the device dimensions or a performance improvement for the same active volume. To guarantee a good application of this kind of materials it is important to describe and model the phenomena that characterize their operation under different regimes. In this paper, a study based in FEM simulations of a motor with bulk superconductor in the rotor is carried out, with the purpose of understand, quantify and qualify which phenomena are present in the different regimes of the motor, leading to obtaining an equivalent electrical circuit with lumped parameters.

Inductive superconducting fault current limiters have already demonstrated their technical viability in electrical networks. Its architecture and robustness make them potentially adequate for distribution networks, and this type of devices is considered as an enabling technology for the advent of embedded generation with renewable energy sources. In order to promote the growth and maturity of these superconducting technologies, fast design tools must be developed, allowing simulating devices with different materials in grids with diverse characteristics. This work presents advances in the development of such tool, which, at present stage, is an effective alternative to software simulations by finite elements methods, reducing dramatically computation time. The algorithms are now compared with experimental results from a laboratory scale prototype, showing the need to refine them.

Supply chains are facing numerous changes that are contributing to increasing their complexity and vulnerability to disturbances, therefore, to survive, supply chains must be resilient. The paper presents a supply chain simulation study for a real case concerned with the Portuguese automotive supply chain. The subset automotive supply chain involved in the case study is a three-echelon supply chain, composed by one automaker, two 1st-tier suppliers, two 2nd-tier suppliers, and one outsource entity. The purpose of the study is to evaluate alternative supply chain scenarios for improving supply chain resilience to a disturbance and understanding how mitigation strategies affect each supply chain entity performance. Two strategies widely used to mitigate disturbance negative effects on supply chains were considered and six scenarios were designed. The scenarios differ in terms of presence or absence of a disturbance in one hand and presence or absence of a mitigation strategy in other hand. To evaluate the scenarios designed, two performance measures were defined per supply chain entity, Lead Time Ratio and Total Cost.

This paper proposes a model for management of supply chain resilience. To this end the structured content analysis of media news is used to analyze a sample constituted by sixty two documents containing evidences of seventy seven companies that were affected by the Japan 2011 earthquake. The sample provides evidences that companies failed to sustain their operations mainly because capacity shortages and material shortages. Also provides empirical evidence of twelve resilience practices to reduce the disturbance severity and the recovery time. Based on these findings four propositions were made and aggregated to propose a model for supply chain resilience management.

Samples of doped and undoped a-Si: H were deposited at temperatures ranging from 100 degrees C to 350 degrees C and then submitted to different dehydrogenation temperatures (from 350 degrees C to 550 degrees C) and times (from 1 h to 4 h). a-Si: H films were characterised after deposition through the measurements of specific material parameters such as: the optical gap, the conductivity at 25 degrees C, the thermal activation energy of conductivity and its hydrogen content. Hydrogen content was measured after each thermal treatment. Substrate dopant contamination from phosphorus-doped a-Si thin films was evaluated by SIMS after complete dehydrogenation and a junction depth of 0.1 mu m was obtained. Dehydrogenation results show a strong dependence of the hydrogen content of the as-deposited film on the deposition temperature. Nevertheless, the dehydrogenation temperature seems to determine the final H content in a way almost independent from the initial content in the sample. H richer films dehydrogenate faster than films with lower hydrogen concentration. (C) 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Samples of doped and undoped a-Si: H were deposited at temperatures ranging from 100 degrees C to 350 degrees C and then submitted to different dehydrogenation temperatures (from 350 degrees C to 550 degrees C) and times (from 1 h to 4 h). a-Si: H films were characterised after deposition through the measurements of specific material parameters such as: the optical gap, the conductivity at 25 degrees C, the thermal activation energy of conductivity and its hydrogen content. Hydrogen content was measured after each thermal treatment. Substrate dopant contamination from phosphorus-doped a-Si thin films was evaluated by SIMS after complete dehydrogenation and a junction depth of 0.1 mu m was obtained. Dehydrogenation results show a strong dependence of the hydrogen content of the as-deposited film on the deposition temperature. Nevertheless, the dehydrogenation temperature seems to determine the final H content in a way almost independent from the initial content in the sample. H richer films dehydrogenate faster than films with lower hydrogen concentration. (C) 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

A strict upper-bound limit analysis finite element formulation is used to estimate shape factors s_gamma and s_q for determining the bearing capacity of shallow foundations using the classic bearing capacity formula. The finite element formulation uses a quadratic approximation for the velocity field, an extension of a previously published Augmented Lagrangian formulation with a linear velocity field, and was implemented for a parallel processing environment. Results from determining the limit loads under three-dimensional conditions are presented and compared with previously published data. The results obtained allow a strict upper-bound determination of the shape factors. Furthermore, a practical proposal for these factors is made and compared with other proposals made by other authors.