The paper presents a production scheduling problem in a foundry equipped with two furnaces and one casting line, where the line is a bottleneck and furnaces, of the same capacity, work in parallel. The amount of produced castings may not exceed the capacity of the line and the furnaces, and their loads determine metal type from which the products are manufactured on the casting line. The purpose of planning is to create the processing order of metal production to prevent delays in the delivery of the ordered products to the customers. The problem is a mix of a lot-sizing and scheduling problems on two machines (the furnaces) run in parallel. The article gives a mathematical model that defines the optimization problem, and its relaxed version based on the concept of a rolling-horizon planning. The proposed approaches, i.e. commercial solver and Iterated Local Search (ILS) heuristic, were tested on a sample data and different problem sizes. The tests have shown that rolling horizon approach gives the best results for most problems, however, developed ILS algorithm gives better results for the largest problem instances with tight furnace capacity.
The graphite form in cast iron is the structure parameter deciding on its all physical and mechanical properties. Three basic forms of graphite: flake, vermicular (compact) and nodular (spheroidal) are singled out in standard cast iron grades, without a heat treatment. Standards of individual grades of cast iron the most often allow only the homogeneous graphite form, sometimes with addition of 5÷10% of the other form. The interesting and - in the authors opinion - future-oriented material can constitute cast iron in which various forms of graphite are present, e.g. in comparative amounts: spherical and vermicular cast irons. Cast iron within which graphite occurs in two or three forms was named „Vari-Morph” (VM) cast iron, i.e. the one in which spherical and vermicular or vermicular and flake graphite occur in a wide range of proportions. The results of investigations of these new cast iron grades and their properties are presented in the hereby paper.
The paper presents the method for multicriteria design of a synchronous generator voltage regulator. The results of the voltage regulator polyoptimisation are compromise sets for a classic controller of type PI and fuzzy logic controller of type Takagi-Sugeno-Kang. A genetic algorithm is used to solve the polyoptimisation problem.
O b j e c t i v e s: The aim of study was to investigate the association between anxiety, depression, stress and determinants of quality of life among Iranian students.
M e t h o d s: The questionnaires were completed by 275 students. The random sampling was conducted in two phases, the stratified sampling which some classes were selected among different classes of faculty of health and at the second phase, in each class the number of students who had the requirements to enter in the study were selected randomly. the logistic regression to find out the association between demographic characteristics with the quality of life was run and according to the normality status of the distribution of data the parametric or non-parametric tests were used.
R e s u l t s: In the univariable model, the students that were living in their own homes had the odds of 2.18 times more than the others to have a higher quality of life level (95% CI: 1.07–4.45). In the multi variable model the anxiety and stress were significantly related to the quality of life and for increasing each 1 unit in the amount of anxiety and stress the odds of a better quality of life decreases 0.19 and 0.03 respectively. Even after adjusting for other covariates – in the multivariable model – both anxiety and stress were associated with the quality of life.
C o n c l u s i o n: It is useful for the universities to understand different aspects of the students’ lives which are under the influence of stress, anxiety and depression, and also determining the resources from which they are originated.
Filtration is one of the most efficient methods of removing Al2O3 inclusions from liquid steel. The efficiency of this process depends on the physicochemical parameters of liquid metal, inclusion and properties of the applied filters. The particles attracted during filtration undergo agglomeration, collisions and chemical reactions on the filter surface, with the emphasis on the mechanism of particle collisions and the role of material from which the filter was made. The aluminum oxide inclusions collide with the filter surface and as the growing process continues, the particles also collide with the previously adsorbed inclusions. At the interface of particle and filter the mixing of the metal bath is most intense, being a result of a sudden change of flow direction and breaking up the stream of liquid metal which is in a direct contact with material. The efficiency of filtration is defined not only by the behavior of individual particles but of all population. The simulations revealed that only a small fraction of these particles adheres directly to the filter material; most of them stick to the former ones. Attention should be also paid to the fact that some of the inclusions which contacted the filter walls do not form a permanent connection and are then entrained by metal. Authors solved the problem of agglomeration and collisions of Al2O3 inclusions with the ceramic surface of the filter with the PSG method, mainly used for the analysis of agglomeration of inclusions during steel refining in the ladle.