Reader-friendly Edible Binarycodes and Sensors Based on Smart Hydrogel

Food and medicines are two of the most essential categories of goods for human beings, providing vital nourishment and healthcare. However, as these products are commercialized and distributed on a global scale, consumers face the threat of counterfeit and deteriorated products. In response, this dissertation presents four prototypes consisting...

Acoustic emission-based indicators of shear failure of reinforced concrete structures without shear reinforcement

Existing concrete bridges require efficient assessment due to increasing traffic load and degrading material. For reinforced concrete structures without shear reinforcement, a typical failure mode is shear, which often means a total loss of structural capacity and does not have an obvious warning beforehand. To indicate the shear failure before...

Preventing major hazard accidents through barrier performance monitoring

Foreseeing or even predicting major accidents is understandably challenging, both for any practitioner involved as for safety scientists and other academics. Understanding these events and trying to prevent them is a primary goal of a safety theory. Major hazard-related accidents rarely occur but when they do, they can cause many casualties and...

Development of A Composite Indicator for Measuring Company Performance from Economic and Environmental Perspectives: A Study on Motor Vehicle Manufacturers

Company performance measurement is fundamental for decision-makers to monitor a company's performance and to solve management problems. The evolution of company performance measurement tools started from a pure financial-biased framework. The first generation of company performance measurement tools was achieved through supplementing the...

Data-based Dynamic Condition Assessment of Railway Catenaries

Railway catenary is the main infrastructure that delivers electric power for train operation. It is a structure commonly constructed along the railway line with contact wires suspended above the track. One or multiple pantographs mounted on the roof of a moving train collects electric current from the catenary through the sliding contact with a...

Intelligent rail maintenance decision support system using KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) enable the infrastructure manager to keep the performance quality of the infrastructure at an acceptable level. A KPI must include specific features of the infrastructure such as functionality and criticality. The KPIs can be classified into three performance levels: (1) technical level KPIs; (2) tactical level...

Applying the Flood Vulnerability Index as a Knowledge base for flood risk assessment

Floods are one of the most common and widely distributed natural risks to life and property worldwide. An important part of modern flood risk management is to evaluate vulnerability to floods. This evaluation can be done only by using a parametric approach. Worldwide there is a need to enhance our understanding of vulnerability and to also...

Health performance of housing: Indicators and tools

Occupants in air-tight houses and with poorly maintained mechanical ventilation systems have stimulated the study of health hazards of housing. Five hundred houses were inspected, to diagnose the relation between lay-out, construction, technical services, interior decorations and potential indoor air pollution or problems with noise and safety....