University of Greenwich

About: University of Greenwich is a education organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 3749 authors who have published 9958 publications receiving 234340 citations.

Spatial repellents: from discovery and development to evidence-based validation.

Abstract: International public health workers are challenged by a burden of arthropod-borne disease that remains elevated despite best efforts in control programmes. With this challenge comes the opportunity to develop novel vector control paradigms to guide product development and programme implementation. The role of vector behaviour modification in disease control was first highlighted several decades ago but has received limited attention within the public health community. This paper presents current evidence highlighting the value of sub-lethal agents, specifically spatial repellents, and their use in global health, and identifies the primary challenges towards establishing a clearly defined and recommended role for spatial repellent products in disease control.

The Two-Stage Assembly Scheduling Problem: Complexity and Approximation

Abstract: This paper introduces a new two-stage assembly scheduling problem. There are m machines at the first stage, each of which produces a component of a job. When all m components are available, a single assembly machine at the second stage completes the job. The objective is to schedule jobs on the machines so that the makespan is minimized. We show that the search for an optimal solution may be restricted to permutation schedules. The problem is proved to be NP-hard in the strong sense even when m = 2. A schedule associated with an arbitrary permutation of jobs is shown to provide a worst-case ratio bound of two, and a heuristic with a worst-case ratio bound of 2-1/m is presented. The compact vector summation technique is applied for finding approximation solutions with worst-case absolute performance guarantees.

Nanocomposite fire retardants — a review

Abstract: Most fire retardant nanocomposites are made from layered silicates and organic polymers, a variety of methods are used in their synthesis. The mechanism for the fire retardancy of these composites is generally considered to be due to the structure of the char formed during combustion, which enables the char to thermally insulate the polymer and inhibit the formation and escape of volatiles during combustion. Fire retardant nanocomposites require relatively low concentrations of silicates for activity, resulting in low additional costs and weight. Improvements in the bulk physical properties of the polymer can be additional advantages over traditional fire retardants.