The design of a high pressure solvent extraction process using liquid ammonia as solvent

The literature on the potential use of liquid ammonia as a solvent for the extraction of aromatic hydrocarbons from mixtures with paraffins, and the application of reflux, has been reviewed. Reference is made to extractors suited to this application. A pilot scale extraction plant was designed comprising a Scm. diameter by 12Scm. high, 50 stage Rotating Disc Contactor with 2 external settlers. Provision was made for operation with, or without, reflux at a pressure of 10 bar and ambient temperature. The solvent recovery unit consisted of an evaporator, compressor and condenser in a refrigeration cycle. Two systems were selected for study, Cumene-n-Heptane-Ammonia and Toluene-Methylcyclohexane-Ammonia. Equlibrium data for the first system was determined experimentally in a specially-designed, equilibrium bomb. A technique was developed to withdraw samples under pressure for analysis by chromatography and titration. The extraction plant was commissioned with a kerosine-water system; detailed operating procedures were developed based on a Hazard and Operability Study. Experimental runs were carried out with both ternary ammonia systems. With the system Toluene-Methylcyclohexane-Ammonia the extraction plant and the solvent recovery facility, operated satisfactorily, and safely,in accordance with the operating procedures. Experimental data gave reasonable agreement with theory. Recommendations are made for further work with plant.

A configuration framework of manufacturing strategy paradigm in state owned enterprises within China's petrochemical industry:building context-embedded configurations for the paradigm of strategic manufacturing management from exploratory case studies

The role of the production system as a key determinant of competitive performance of business operations- has long been the subject of industrial organization research, even predating the .explicit conceptua1isation of manufacturing, strategy in the literature. Particular emergent production issues such as the globalisation of production, global supply chain management, management of integrated manufacturing and a growing e~busjness environment are expected to critically influence the overall competitive performance and therefore the strategic success of the organization. More than ever, there is a critical need to configure and improve production system and operations competence in a strategic way so as to contribute to the long-term competitiveness of the organization. In order to operate competitively and profitably, manufacturing companies, no matter how well managed, all need a long-term 'strategic direction' for the development of operations competence in order to consistently produce more market value with less cost towards a leadership position. As to the long-term competitiveness, it is more important to establish a dynamic 'strategic perspective' for continuous operational improvements in pursuit of this direction, as well as ongoing reviews of the direction in relation to the overall operating context. However, it also clear that the 'existing paradigm of manufacturing strategy development' is incapable of adequately responding to the increasing complexities and variations of contemporary business operations. This has been factually reflected as many manufacturing companies are finding that methodologies advocated in the existing paradigm for developing manufacturing strategy have very limited scale and scope for contextual contingency in empirical application. More importantly, there has also emerged a deficiency in the multidimensional and integrative profile from a theoretical perspective when operationalising the underlying concept of strategic manufacturing management established in the literature. The point of departure for this study was a recognition of such contextual and unitary limitations in the existing paradigm of manufacturing strategy development when applied to contemporary industrial organizations in general, and Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in particular. As China gradually becomes integrated into the world economy, the relevance of Western management theory and its paradigm becomes a practical matter as much as a theoretical issue. Since China markedly differs from Western countries in terms of culture, society, and political and economic systems, it presents promising grounds to test and refine existing management theories and paradigms with greater contextual contingency and wider theoretical perspective. Under China's ongoing programmes of SOE reform, there has been an increased recognition that strategy development is the very essence of the management task for managers of manufacturing companies in the same way as it is for their counterparts in Western economies. However, the Western paradigm often displays a rather naive and unitary perspective of the nature of strategic management decision-making, one which largely overlooks context-embedded factors and social/political influences on the development of manufacturing strategy. This thesis studies the successful experiences of developing manufacturing strategy from five high-performing large-scale SOEs within China’s petrochemical industry. China’s petrochemical industry constitutes a basic heavy industrial sector, which has always been a strategic focus for reform and development by the Chinese government. Using a confirmation approach, the study has focused on exploring and conceptualising the empirical paradigm of manufacturing strategy development practiced by management. That is examining the ‘empirical specifics’ and surfacing the ‘managerial perceptions’ of content configuration, context of consideration, and process organization for developing a manufacturing strategy during the practice. The research investigation adopts a qualitative exploratory case study methodology with a semi-structural front-end research design. Data collection follows a longitudinal and multiple-case design and triangulates case evidence from sources including qualitative interviews, direct observation, and a search of documentations and archival records. Data analysis follows an investigative progression from a within-case preliminary interpretation of facts to a cross-case search for patterns through theoretical comparison and analytical generalization. The underlying conceptions in both the literature of manufacturing strategy and related studies in business strategy were used to develop theoretical framework and analytical templates applied during data collection and analysis. The thesis makes both empirical and theoretical contributions to our understanding of 'contemporary management paradigm of manufacturing strategy development'. First, it provides a valuable contextual contingency of the 'subject' using the business setting of China's SOEs in petrochemical industry. This has been unpacked into empirical configurations developed for its context of consideration, its content and process respectively. Of special note, a lean paradigm of business operations and production management discovered at case companies has significant implications as an emerging alternative for high-volume capital intensive state manufacturing in China. Second, it provides a multidimensional and integrative theoretical profile of the 'subject' based upon managerial perspectives conceptualised at case companies when operationalising manufacturing strategy. This has been unpacked into conceptual frameworks developed for its context of consideration, its content constructs, and its process patterns respectively. Notably, a synergies perspective towards the operating context, competitive priorities and competence development of business operations and production management has significant implications for implementing a lean manufacturing paradigm. As a whole, in so doing, the thesis established a theoretical platform for future refinement and development of context-specific methodologies for developing manufacturing strategy.

Product design in the context of the social needs in less industrialised economies

This thesis is related to the subject of technical innovation, specifically to the activity of design in microenterprises operating in less industrialised economies. Design here is understood as a process, which is not the sole domain of formally trained categories such as engineers, architects or industrial designers. The 'professional boundary' discussion in this investigation is perceived as secondary as, in this context, products are designed, copied or adapted by workers, entrepreneurs themselves, or directly by the poor community. Design capacity at this level is considered to be important both in relation to the conception of capital and consumer goods and to the building up of technical knowledge. Although professional design emerged in Latin America little over three decades ago, this activity has remained marginalised throughout industry. Design activity tends to be concentrated in some product categories in the formalised industrial sector. For microenterprises operating informally, industrial design appears to be unknown. The existing literature pays little attention to 'informal design' capacity. Other areas of knowledge, such as development economies, recognise the importance of microenterprises and technological capability but neglect the potential role of industrial design in small manufacturing units. The management literature, though it focuses on technical innovation and design, has also paid little attention to 'informal design'. In less industrialised economies this neglect is felt by the lack of programmes specifically tailored to create or stimulate 'informal design'. There is a need for recognition of 'informal design' capacity and for the implementation of programmes which specifically target design as a central activity in the manufacturing firm, independent of their size and technological capability. Addressing 'design by the poor for the poor', requires a down-to-earth approach.

Improved production of industrially relevant recombinant proteins: application of multi-factorial design of experiments and scalable process modelling

The work described in this thesis focuses on the use of a design-of-experiments approach in a multi-well mini-bioreactor to enable the rapid establishments of high yielding production phase conditions in yeast, which is an increasingly popular host system in both academic and industrial laboratories. Using green fluorescent protein secreted from the yeast, Pichia pastoris, a scalable predictive model of protein yield per cell was derived from 13 sets of conditions each with three factors (temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen) at 3 levels and was directly transferable to a 7 L bioreactor. This was in clear contrast to the situation in shake flasks, where the process parameters cannot be tightly controlled. By further optimisating both the accumulation of cell density in batch and improving the fed-batch induction regime, additional yield improvement was found to be additive to the per cell yield of the model. A separate study also demonstrated that improving biomass improved product yield in a second yeast species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Investigations of cell wall hydrophobicity in high cell density P. pastoris cultures indicated that cell wall hydrophobin (protein) compositional changes with growth phase becoming more hydrophobic in log growth than in lag or stationary phases. This is possibly due to an increased occurrence of proteins associated with cell division. Finally, the modelling approach was validated in mammalian cells, showing its flexibility and robustness. In summary, the strategy presented in this thesis has the benefit of reducing process development time in recombinant protein production, directly from bench to bioreactor.

Human performance modelling as an aid in the process of manufacturing system design

Manufacturing system design is an ongoing activity within industry. Modelling tools based on Discrete Event Simulation are often used by practitioners during this design cycle. However, such tools do not adequately model the behaviour of 'direct' workers in manufacturing environments. There is an important need to expand the capability of modelling to include the relationships between human centred factors (demography, attitudes, beliefs, etc), their working environment (physical and organizational), and their subsequent performance in terms of productive routines. Therefore, this paper describes research that has formed a pilot modelling methodology that is an important first step in providing such a capability.

Trust in leader-follower relationships:how and when trust building enhances dyadic and organisational outcomes

Guided by theory in both the trust and leadership domains, the overarching aim of this thesis was to answer a fundamental question. Namely, how and when does trust-building between leaders and followers enhance leader-member exchange (LMX) development and organisational trust? Although trust is considered to be at the crux of the leader-follower relationship, surprisingly little theoretical or empirical attention has been devoted to understanding the precise nature of this relationship. By integrating both a typology of trustworthy behaviour and a process model of trust development with LMX theory, study one developed and tested a new model of LMX development with leader-follower trust-building as the primary mechanism. In a three wave cross-lagged design, 294 student dyads in a business simulation completed measures of trust perceptions and LMX across the first 6 months of the LMX relationship. Trust-building was found to account for unexplained variance in the LMX construct over time, while controlling for initial relationship quality, thus confirming the critical role of the trust-building process in LMX development. The strongest evidence was found for the role of integrity-based trust-building behaviour, albeit only when such behaviour was not attributed to insincere motives. The results for ability and benevolence-based trustworthy behaviour revealed valued insights into the developmental nature of trustworthiness perceptions within LMX relationships. Thus, the pattern of results in study one provided a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the dynamic interplay between trust and LMX. In study two, leader trust-building was investigated cross-sectionally within an organisational sample of 201 employees. The central aim of this study was to investigate whether leader trust-building within leader-follower relationships could be leveraged for organisational trust. As expected, the trust-building process instigated by members in study one was replicated for leaders in study two. In addition, the results were most consistent for benevolence-based trust building, whereas both integrity- and ability-based trust-building were moderated by the position of the leader within the organisation’s hierarchy. Overall, the findings of this thesis shed considerable light on the richness of trusting perceptions in organisations, and the critical role of trust-building in LMX development and organisational trust.

“This beer is off!”:building a dialogue game for servitization

Purpose: Development and evaluation of a prototype dialogue game for servitization is reported. Design/methodology/approach: This paper reports the design of the iServe game, from user centered design, through implementation using the Unity games engine to evaluation, a process which took 270 researcher hours. Findings: No relationship was found between either age or gaming experience and usability. Participants who identified themselves as non-experts in servitization recognized the potential of the game to teach servitization concepts to other novice learners. Originality/value: The potential of business games for education and executive development has been recognized but factors, including high development cost, inhibit their uptake. Games engines offer a potential solution.

The process of building public-private partnerships:an organizational identity perspective

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Practice based learning approaches in collaborative design and engineering education:a case study investigation into the benefits of a crossdisciplinary practice based learning strategy

This study explores the ongoing pedagogical development of a number of undergraduate design and engineering programmes in the United Kingdom. Observations and data have been collected over several cohorts to bring a valuable perspective to the approaches piloted across two similar university departments while trialling a number of innovative learning strategies. In addition to the concurrent institutional studies the work explores curriculum design that applies the principles of Co-Design, multidisciplinary and trans disciplinary learning, with both engineering and product design students working alongside each other through a practical problem solving learning approach known as the CDIO learning initiative (Conceive, Design Implement and Operate) [1]. The study builds on previous work presented at the 2010 EPDE conference: The Effect of Personality on the Design Team: Lessons from Industry for Design Education [2]. The subsequent work presented in this paper applies the findings to mixed design and engineering team based learning, building on the insight gained through a number of industrial process case studies carried out in current design practice. Developments in delivery also aligning the CDIO principles of learning through doing into a practice based, collaborative learning experience and include elements of the TRIZ creative problem solving technique [3]. The paper will outline case studies involving a number of mixed engineering and design student projects that highlight the CDIO principles, combined with an external industrial design brief. It will compare and contrast the learning experience with that of a KTP derived student project, to examine an industry based model for student projects. In addition key areas of best practice will be presented, and student work from each mode will be discussed at the conference.

Incorporating Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) practices into the planning context:the conceptual case for lot-scale developments

In recent decades, a number of sustainable strategies and polices have been created to protect and preserve our water environments from the impacts of growing communities. The Australian approach, Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), defined as the integration of urban planning and design with the urban water cycle management, has made considerable advances on design guidelines since 2000. WSUD stormwater management systems (e.g. wetlands, bioretentions, porous pavement etc), also known as Best Management Practices (BMPs) or Low Impact Development (LID), are slowly gaining popularity across Australia, the USA and Europe. There have also been significant improvements in how to model the performance of the WSUD technologies (e.g. MUSIC software). However, the implementation issues of these WSUD practices are mainly related to ongoing institutional capacity. Some of the key problems are associated with a limited awareness of urban planners and designers; in general, they have very little knowledge of these systems and their benefits to the urban environments. At the same time, hydrological engineers should have a better understanding of building codes and master plans. The land use regulations are equally as important as the physical site conditions for determining opportunities and constraints for implementing WSUD techniques. There is a need for procedures that can make a better linkage between urban planners and WSUD engineering practices. Thus, this paper aims to present the development of a general framework for incorporating WSUD technologies into the site planning process. The study was applied to lot-scale in the Melbourne region, Australia. Results show the potential space available for fitting WSUD elements, according to building requirements and different types of housing densities. © 2011 WIT Press.

Parent involvement on school advisory councils: A process evaluation at the middle school level

Increasing parental involvement was made an important goal for all Florida schools in educational reform legislation in the 1990's. A forum for this input was established and became known as the School Advisory Council (SAC). To demonstrate the importance of process and inclusion, a south Florida school district and its local teacher's union agreed on the following five goals for SACs: (a) to foster an environment of professional collaboration among all stakeholders, (b) to assist in the preparation and evaluation of the school improvement plan, (c) to address all state and district goals, (d) to serve as the avenue for authentic and representative input from all stakeholders, and (e) to ensure the continued existence of the consensus-building process on all issues related to the school's instructional program. ^ The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent and in what ways the parent members of one south Florida middle school's SAC achieved the five district goals during its first three years of implementation. The primary participants were 16 parents who served as members of the SAC, while 16 non-parent members provided perspective on parent involvement as “outside sources.” Being qualitative by design, factors such as school climate, leadership styles, and the quality of parental input were described from data collected from four sources: parent interviews, a questionnaire of non-parents, researcher observations, and relevant documents. A cross-case analysis of all data informed a process evaluation that described the similarities and differences of intended and observed outcomes of parent involvement from each source using Stake's descriptive matrix model. A formative evaluation of the process compared the observed outcomes with standards set for successful SACs, such as the district's five goals. ^ The findings indicated that parents elected to the SACs did not meet the intended goals set by the state and district. The school leadership did not foster an environment of professional collaboration and authentic decision-making for parents and other stakeholders. The overall process did not include consensus-building, and there was little if any input by parents on school improvement and other important issues relating to the instructional program. Only two parents gave the SAC a successful rating for involving parents in the decision-making process. Although compliance was met in many of the procedural transactions of the SAC, the reactions of parents to their perceived role and influence often reflected feelings of powerlessness and frustration with a process that many thought lacked meaningfulness and productivity. Two conclusions made from this study are as follows: (a) that the role of the principal in the collaborative process is pivotal, and (b) that the normative-re-educative approach to change would be most appropriate for SACs. ^