Product Lifecycle Management

Based on very early occurring ruptures found in the first stage high pressure turbine blades of a turbo reactor in a local aviation company, this study has the aim to determine their safe life. The first stage blades are subjected to simultaneous action of gas pressure coming from the combustion chamber, centrifugal forces in the case of the rotor blades and to important temperatures transients, which progress in a very aggressive environment due to hot gases. These combined parameters cause a high state of stress involving several complex mechanisms of damage, such as: fatigue caused by mechanical stress fluctuations, thermo-mechanical fatigue caused by temperature variations and corrosion caused on the stressed elements. Life cycle determination asks for stress evaluation of blades regarding several variables which are approached deterministically in the study. Heat exchange between combustion gases and metal blades is considered. The total stress on two kinds of blades is calculated by the addition of the thermal effect and the mechanical loading. The stress cycle is then calculated for different steps of the engine function during the operation by considering the variation of the thermal and the mechanical properties of the system. Safe life determination is done by two different approaches: the safe life approach by the initiation model and the damage tolerance approach considering the defect growth mechanics and considering the pitting corrosion effect. The calculation is applied for stator and rotor blades of an aero engine high pressure turbine made of NI 738. Since these parts are high risk components from the point of view of potential failure consequences, the risk is assessed as well. The results obtained are studied to determine the solution to the problem, and to propose a safe decision to be taken about the design or maintenance procedures.

Today built heritage conservation should consider constantly changing needs of users. In particular, recent problems related to the economic crisis and to environmental pollution make issues related to consumption reduction and environmental impact particularly important.
Even if historical buildings have many sustainable features in terms of embodied energy and land consumption, they don’t perfectly meet current standards and impose many restraints from a constructive and typological/functional point of view.
In recent years a new approach to preservation has been derived from the theory of “care of monuments” by Ruskin: a preventive and constant maintenance,  interpreted as less destructive and cheaper intervention and management of the continual becoming. Besides a lifecycle approach leads to reconsider management and to rethink the intervention putting in place a balance between positive and negative contributions in the long term.
The LCA mantra “from cradle to grave” is usually applied to new products taking into account all components, from the extraction/production of raw materials to the disposal of constructive elements. Since the main goal of historical buildings' conservation is to shift to infinity their dismissal time, this study aims to lay the foundations for an innovative approach for sustainability assessment of existing buildings that should consider the resources savings and doesn’t set a time limit for the building’s life.
The paper focuses on “minor” built heritage, the most exposed to abandonment and decay.

SUMMARY BAE Systems Naval Ships is undertaking a comprehensive overhaul of all aspects of its approach to the engineering, design and manufacture of complex warships. Through a partnership with the University of Strathclyde, research is underway on the implementation of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to meet organisational objectives. An overview of PLM is provided highlighting the challenges specific to the characteristics of Engineering to Order (ETO) products. These challenges relate to understanding PLM organisational objectives and aligning these with the relevant technology. Central to BAE Systems Naval Ships PLM approach is the Integrated Bill of Materials (iBoM) which is a critical enabler for the organisations transformational objectives. The implementation of the iBoM will be used to develop a framework for implementing PLM to ensure that the technology supports the business objectives of ETO product development, i.e. the integration of business and technology architectures.

En 2009, Kana est leader sur le marché français de l’édition de manga. Mais, après des années de croissance spectaculaire, le secteur entre en 2009 dans une phase de stagnation. Par ailleurs, l’entreprise observe que les ventes de ses séries chutent très rapidement dès lors qu’elles ne sortent plus de nouveaux tomes. Face à ce double constat - ralentissement de la croissance et cycle de vie très éphémère des séries - l’entreprise s’interroge sur les orientations stratégiques et actions à mettre en œuvre.

Public and private procurers around the world are either mandating or encouraging the adoption of BIM within their construction sectors and projects. For example, in the UK, BIM (i.e., 'BIM Level 2') is mandatory on all government centrally procured projects. 'BIM Level 2' is a collaborative way of working, in which 3D models with the required data are created in separate discipline models according to a set of guides, standards and specifications. Mandating BIM Level 2 required the development of a range of guides, standards and specifications 1. These policy documents are intended to guide and facilitate the adoption of BIM by the project supply chain. They are considered complex as evidenced from the large amounts of requirements included within each of them and from the strenuous discussions around their implementation in professional networks and specialised blogs. Tools for assessing the compliance of project activities and deliverables these against requirements of these policy documents do not exist. This research proposes a tool, which enables a project team to determine the compliance of project activities and deliverables with BIM Level 2 policy documents at every phase of the project lifecycle. The tool was built by extracting all requirements from the policy documents. This paper will present the tool and demonstrate its application in a case study. The results show that the proposed tool can help in assessing the compliance of project activities with the policy documents and in simplifying their complexity. The two limitations of this research include the following: a) the used requirements were added to the matrix without any prior processing (e.g. semantic and ontological development); and b) an assumption was made that the policy documents used to build the matrix are trustworthy despite several of them are still at the specification stage – a stage that precedes their conversion into standard – and are untested from research perspective.

Making and Being offers a framework for teaching art that emphasizes contemplation, collaboration, and political economy. Authors Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, two visual arts educators and members of the collective BFAMFAPhD*, share ideas and teaching strategies that they have adapted to spaces of learning which range widely, from self-organized workshops for professional artists to Foundations BFA and MFA thesis classes. This hands-on guide includes activities, worksheets, and assignments and is a critical resource for artists and art educators today. Making and Being is a book, a series of videos, a deck of cards, and an interactive website with freely downloadable content.

*BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. BFAMFAPhD core members are: Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martínez Poppe, Agnes Szanyi, Emily Tareila, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.

We wrote this book for those of you who want a holistic art education that includes how to be both more fully present with yourself and with others. The term holistic means that the parts of any given system are intimately interconnected; that they are understandable only in relation to the whole system. How can you talk about making a new project without talking about labor conditions? How can you talk about labor conditions without talking about payment? It’s time to address your artistic labor, your budgets your storage units, your gifts, and your well-being.

Practice-based textile research has an important role to play in understanding the potential for material flows for all design disciplines. We know that designers need to work with circularity principles within a sustainability framework and must fully understand the technical and biological cycles. Yet innovation in the field has shown us that for textile designers, circular design also needs to consider how these cycles can interconnect and how understanding the speed of cycles is important too. This chapter presents four projects – developed through interdisciplinary projects with scientists and industry experts – that propose new strategies for impacting our future design decisions.

This paper reviews work conducted by practiced-based textile design researchers based at the University of the Arts London (UAL) who were part of the multi-disciplinary, Swedish-based Mistra Future Fashion research consortium between June 2011 – May 2015. The objective of the consortium was to research opportunities to advance a more sustainable, yet still profitable, fashion industry. The final stage of the project involved developing practice-based approaches through physical exhibition prototypes, which formed the basis of the project’s online exhibition, The Textile Toolbox (Earley & Goldsworthy, 2014).
Here we discuss two of these design prototypes which both explored ‘designing for cyclability’ as a proactive approach to improving the retention of material value within ‘circular fashion systems’. Designing in order to enable fully joined up cycles of material use is the ultimate aim for both approaches, but this ‘speed’ of cycle creates very different challenges on which to make informed and appropriate design choices.
The two approaches are deliberately extreme opposites, with ‘short-life’ closed-loop garments explored as complementary to ‘long-life’ user engagement strategies. Both can ultimately be argued to have an ‘extending’ affect on materials in the value-chain; one by keeping products in use over multiple cycles in perpetuity, the other by extending the single use cycle of a product over time. By exploring this polarisation of ‘speeds and needs’ we aim to gain insights into creating an effective circular materials economy, which acknowledges the complex nature of our current and emerging fashion system.

The common failures mechanisms of boiler components at elevated temperatures and monitoring techniques used in power plants to detect damaging or failures are generally well described in literature. Despite of different classification concerning the principal failure mechanisms of boiler thermal power plant components, it is necessary to emphasize that essential difference between these classification does not exist. Concerning the different failures mechanisms it is obvious that the most of them are completely explained and clear in physical sense of process but some of them are not still so explicit. Therefore, until today there is a great interest to investigate the failures of power plant boiler components especially having in mind the all peculiarities of particular events. This efforts are necessary while a full assessment of the failure mechanism(s) is required to prevent further failures due to the same causes. The numerous case studies presented in this paper were done as a contribution to this efforts.