There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Rapid advances in industrial information integration methods have spurred tremendous growth in the use of enterprise systems. Consequently, a variety of techniques have been used for probing enterprise systems. These techniques include business process management, workflow management, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), grid computing, and others. Many applications require a combination of these techniques, which is giving rise to the emergence of enterprise systems. Development of the techniques has originated from different disciplines and has the potential to significantly improve the performance of enterprise systems. However, the lack of powerful tools still poses a major hindrance to exploiting the full potential of enterprise systems. In particular, formal methods and systems methods are crucial for modeling complex enterprise systems, which poses unique challenges. In this paper, we briefly survey the state of the art in the area of enterprise systems as they relate to industrial informatics.

Enterprise Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends

DEM/CFD-DEM Modelling of Non-spherical Particulate Systems: Theoretical Developments and Applications

Compared to conventional machining (CM), ultrasonic vibration-assisted machining (UVAM) with high-frequency and small-amplitude has exhibited good cutting performances for advanced materials. In recent years, advances in ultrasonic generator, ultrasonic transducer, and horn structures have led to the rapid progress in the development of UVAM. Following this trend, numerous new design requirements and theoretical concepts have been proposed and studied successively, however, very few studies have been conducted from a comprehensive perspective. To address this gap in the literature and understanding the development trend of UVAM, a critical overview of UVAM is presented in this study, covering different vibration-assisted machining styles, device architectures, and theoretical analysis. This overview covers the evolution of typical hardware systems used to achieve vibratory motions from the one-dimensional UVAM to three-dimensional UVAM, the discussion of cutting characteristics with periodic separation between the tools and workpiece and the analysis of processing properties. Challenges for UVAM include ultrasonic vibration systems with high power, large amplitude, and high efficiency, as well as theoretical research on the dynamics and cutting characteristics of UVAM. Consequently, based on the current limitations and challenges, device improvement and theoretical breakthrough play a significant role in future research on UVAM.

Review of ultrasonic vibration-assisted machining in advanced materials

In industries such as aerospace, petrochemistry and automobile, many parts of different machines are under environment which shows high temperature and high pressure, and have their proneness to wear and corrosion. Therefore, the wear resistibility and stability under high temperature need to be further improved. Nowadays, Laser cladding (LC) is widely used in machine parts repairing and functional coating due to its advantages such as lower dilution rate, small heat-affected zone and good metallurgical bonding between coating and substrate. In this paper, LC is introduced in detail from aspects of process simulation, monitoring and parameter optimization. At the same time, the paper gives a comprehensive review over LC material system as high entropy alloys (HEAs), amorphous alloy and single crystal alloy have been gradually showing their advantages over traditional metal materials in LC. In addition, the applications of LC in functional coatings and in maintenance of machine parts are also outlined. Also, the existing problems and the development trend of LC is discussed then.

Lida Zhu

Papers

Review of ultrasonic vibration-assisted machining in advanced materials

Recent research and development status of laser cladding: A review

Chatter detection in milling process based on VMD and energy entropy

Recent progress of chatter prediction, detection and suppression in milling

Surface morphology evaluation of multi-angle 2D ultrasonic vibration integrated with nanofluid minimum quantity lubrication grinding