Engineering change impact on product development processes

This paper presents a method to manage Engineering Changes (EC) during the product development process, which is seen to be a complex system. The ability to manage engineering changes efficiently reflects the agility of an enterprise. Although there are unnecessary ECs that should be avoided, many of the ECs are actually beneficial. The proposed method explores the linkages between the product development process features and product specifications dependencies. It suggests ways of identifying and managing specification dependencies to support the Engineering Change Management process. Furthermore, the impacts of an EC on the product specifications as well as on the process organization are studied. © 2009 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Development and evaluation of an alternative method for processing elastic-lidar return signals

A method for interpreting elastic-lidar return signals in heavily-polluted atmospheres is presented. It is based on an equation derived directly from the classic lidar equation, which highlights gradients of the atmospheric backscattering properties along the laser optical path. The method is evaluated by comparing its results with those obtained with the differential absorption technique. The results were obtained from locating and ranging measurements in pollutant plumes and contaminated environments around central México. © World Scientific Publishing Company.

Evidence for X(5) critical point symmetry in 128Ce

Lifetimes of excited states in 128Ce were measured using the recoil distance Doppler-shift (RDDS) and the Doppler-shift attenuation (DSAM) methods. The experiments were performed at the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory of Yale University. Excited states of 128Ce were populated in the 100Mo(32Si,4n) reaction at 120 MeV and the nuclear γ decay was measured with an array of eight Clover detectors positioned at forward and backward angles. The deduced yrast transition strengths together with the energies of the levels within the ground-state (gs) band of 128Ce are in agreement with the predicted values for the X(5) critical point symmetry. Thus, we suggest 128Ce as a benchmark X(5) nucleus in the mass A ≈ 130 region. © World Scientific Publishing Company.