Publications with fulltext

Nowadays, consumer-to-consumer communication and its impact on purchase decisions have gained substantial consideration owing to digitalization and the emergence of internet-based social media platforms. Social media allows consumers to communicate with thousands of people well beyond their network. Consequently, the demand for transparency from industrial corporations has increased. It even becomes more important to understand how sustainability-related information on social media holds organizations accountable for their wrongdoings and reward them for taking sustainability-related initiatives. In this research work, the authors investigate how information that is available on social media influences consumers’ purchase behavior with regard to sustainable products in the context of developing countries. Therefore, the authors surveyed social media users residing in Pakistan and used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze the collected data. The results established that positive and negative sustainability-related information on social media significantly influences consumers’ intention to purchase sustainable products. Furthermore, this study explains that consumers’ willingness to seek sustainabilityrelated information makes them dependent on social media and this dependency on social media affects their intention to purchase.

As seen in recent years, the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment has made flexibility in product design and production planning more important than ever. Therefore, companies must be able to quickly respond to the dynamically changing environment. However, research on the flexibility of product design and manufacturing systems has been underway for a long time, only a few studies address their relationship. In this paper, we give an overview of literature related to flexibility and add transparency to the relationship between engineering changes, product development, and production. Based on that, we propose a conceptual framework for co-development to improve the flexibility of product development and production. As part of the framework, we introduce a visualization that reveals the propagation of changes in the product and into the production to create deeper insights for conjoint redesign. To exploit further synergies of product and production, we suggest modularization with focus on strategic module drivers enhancing flexibility. Further support for the comparison of alternative concepts can be provided through digital twin-based simulations of the production system.

In heterogeneous catalysis, operando measurements probe catalysts in their active state and are essential for revealing complex catalyst structure–activity relationships. The development of appropriate operando sample environments for spatially resolved studies has come strongly into focus in recent years, particularly when coupled to the powerful and multimodal characterization tools available at synchrotron light sources. However, most catalysis studies at synchrotron facilities only measure structural information about the catalyst in a spatially resolved manner, whereas gas analysis is restricted to the reactor outlet. Here, a fully automated and integrated catalytic profile reactor setup is shown for the combined measurement of temperature, gas composition and high-energy X-ray diffraction (XRD) profiles, using the oxidative de­hydrogenation of C2H6 to C2H4 over MoO3/γ-Al2O3 as a test system. The profile reactor methodology was previously developed for X-ray absorption spectroscopy and is here extended for operando XRD. The profile reactor is a versatile and accessible research tool for combined spatially resolved structure–activity profiling, enabling the use of multiple synchrotron-based characterization methods to promote a knowledge-based optimization of a wide range of catalytic systems in a time- and resource-efficient way.

By conducting experiments in controlled environments, design researchers test the suitability of design methods for users in practice. However, users in practice bring a variety of background knowledge that is not reflected by the samples with homogeneous knowledge used in controlled environments, especially student samples. To investigate the influence of background knowledge, two method validation experiments with participants with different background knowledge were replicated and evaluated. The results show an influence of background knowledge regarding method use and outcome. Therefore, the background knowledge of the participants must be taken into account when planning method validation experiments in order to ensure that the results are valid for practice.

Thermal barrier coatings are essential materials systems for insulating and protecting substrates exposed to high temperatures. In such systems, the heat transfer has three possible paths: conduction, convection and irradiation. The higher the operating temperature, the more important it is to control or protect against the radiative component, since the radiative heat flux becomes non-negligible. The radiation can be controlled by the use of ceramic-based photonic nanostructures, namely photonic crystals and photonic glasses, creating so-called reflective thermal barrier coatings. In this work, mullite inverse photonic glasses (PhG) have been produced by thermally induced reaction on sol–gel-based silica structures coated with nanometric films of Al2O3 by atomic layer deposition. The conversion to mullite was carried out following a two-stage heat-treatment. The pre-annealing associated with the further mullite formation results in an excellent structural stability of these PhGs up to 1500 °C, being able to retain their high reflectivity in the near infrared range. Therefore, this structure can be considered for next-generation reflective thermal barrier coatings. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]