Cottage industries comprise a sub-group of informal sector income generation activities which are conducted in the home environment and organized around families or households. Cottage industry workers may be at risk of exposure to harmful substances associated with their work, and given the lack of separation of cottage industry activities from living spaces, their families and neighbors may s...

The NSERC Strategic Grant project, with industrial co-funding from Rio Tinto Alcan and in kind support from Environment Canada, awarded to Dr. Chris Wood (McMaster University) and Dr. Jim McGeer (Wilfrid Laurier University) has officially started in September. The project is titled “Development of a Tissue Residue Approach for Risk Assessment of Metals in the Canadian Freshwater Environment. Th...

This report, prepared by the Center for Competitive Analysis of the University of Missouri Outreach and Extension (UO/E), provides an overview of some important aspects of the Sheet Metal Work industry (“sheet metal industry”), Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code 3444. Its primary intended audiences are UO/E, which may consider educational programming designed to assist business owner...

Positioning the organization in the strategic environment of its industry is one of the first and most important phases of the organizational strategic planning and in today knowledge-based economy has its importance been duplicated for higher education institutes as the centers of education, knowledge creation and knowledge worker training. Up to now, various models with diverse approaches hav...

The metal fmishing industry uses over 40 production processes to produce a wide range of metal products. Waste streams generated include wastewater, waste oils, spent solvents, and spent process solutions. Current1,v a wide variety of techniques which minimize waste are available. Cost-effective methods to reduce electroplating wastewater contamination include water conserv&ion and drag-out red...

The purpose of our research project is to develop a “clean interface” between design and fabrication facilities for the production of custom machined parts. The research accomplishments are summarized: 1.Creation of a new format for data exchange, NCML (Numerically Controlled Markup Language), 2. Development of three prototype systems to illustrate how NCML can be effectively used to conduct E-...

Defining strategic position of the organizations within the industry environment is one of the basic and most important phases of strategic planning to which extent that one of the fundamental schools of strategic planning is the strategic positioning school. In today’s knowledge-based economy and dynamic environment, it is essential for universities as the centers of education, knowledge creat...

The aim of this paper is to utilize Bayesian Networks scenario-building method to create a framework for analyzing the future of Iran’s energy industry. This framework helps to develop more resilient conservation policies when faced with uncontrollable, irreducible uncertainty by the ability to prediction and diagnose scenarios. Also this paper aims to quantify the scenarios as well as explaini...

Die performance and its service life is a non-trivial issue in metal forming industry as many factors in die life cycle from design, fabrication, to downstream service, all affect it. In this report, a simulation-based approach for die life estimation and improvement is developed by employing the FEM technology and metal fatigue theory. Using industrial part as case study, the validity, robustn...

The semiconductor industry is headed towards a new era of scaling and uncertainty with new key building blocks for the next-generation chips, the high-κ metal-gate transistor. There is a need for statistical characterization of high-κ metal-gate digital gates as a function of process parameter variations to make them available for designers. In this paper, we present a methodology for PVT aware...