Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
706
result(s) for
"domestic appliances"
Sort by:
Home futures : living in yesterday's tomorrow
The home of the future has long been a topic of fascination in popular culture and an intriguing prospect for designers, and the 20th century offered up countless visions of the future of domestic life, from the aspirational to the radical. Whether it was the dream of the fully mechanized home or the notion that technology might free us from the home altogether, the domestic realm was a site of endless invention and speculation. But what happened to those visions? Are the smart homes of today and patterns of use in the sharing economy the future that architects and designers once predicted, or has the home proved resistant to radical change? 'Home Futures: Living in Yesterday's Tomorrow' explores different approaches to reinventing domestic life, tracing the social and technological developments that have driven change in the home. The first comprehensive survey of the 20th century's aspirational, radical and futuristic visions of the home, this richly illustrated publication showcases a range of ideas and plans for the future from the prescient to the fantastical that designers produced as they imagined new ways of living at home and on the move, independently and collectively, with more and with less.
Book
The determinants of corporate profitability in the Italian domestic appliances industry
Among the industries that characterize the Italian sectoral specialization, domestic appliances have had, since the 1950s, a prominentrole. However, from the beginning of the 2000s, the Italian producers have experienced a contraction in the total output and severe losses in terms of export shares in the global market. Within the industry, some firms have been successful, positively contributing to the aggregate performance, while others have performed poorly and reduced the overall sectoral growth and competitiveness. By employing a sample of about 140 companies observed in the period 2007–2016 and using a dynamic panel approach, we inquire into the determinants of profitability in the domestic appliances industry in Italy. Competitiveness (in terms of both higher labor productivity and lower labor cost per employee) is a key determinant of profitability in this industry. Moreover, firm (absolute) size, the firm’s financial structure and the firm’s market share also play a role in explaining differences in profit rates across firms. Managers and policy makers should take the maturity of the domestic appliances industry into account in order to take proper decisions and design effective interventions, all aimed at sustaining the sectoral competitiveness in the global market.
Journal Article
Reliable assessment of uncertainty for appliance recognition in NILM using conformal prediction
A primary task of Non‐intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is the identification of appliances that are switched on or off. However, state‐of‐the‐art machine learning methods such as deep learning do not express uncertainty of their predictions. Especially in cases where appliances are confused, it is desirable that an NILM system can suggest multiple possible predictions to the end‐user, including its confidence and credibility of any given prediction. This can be achieved using conformal prediction, being an effective way to quantify uncertainty of a given machine learning model. In this work, conformal prediction is introduced for NILM and applied to a neural network. The approach is explained and supported by several examples.
Journal Article
Optimal Scheduling of Domestic Appliances via MILP
This paper analyzes a consumption scheduling mechanism for domestic appliances within a home area network. The aim of the proposed scheduling is to minimize the total energy price paid by the consumer and to reduce power peaks in order to achieve a balanced daily load schedule. An exact and computationally efficient mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation of the problem is presented. This model is verified by several problem instances. Realistic scenarios based on the real price tariffs commercially available in the Czech Republic are calculated. The results obtained by solving the optimization problem are compared with a simulation of the ripple control service currently used by many domestic consumers in the Czech Republic.
Journal Article
Repair and recycling of PCBs and their components based on obsolescence index: a domestic electrical appliances case study
Population expansion and improving living standards, particularly in developed nations, have led to an increase in the usage of domestic electrical equipment, worldwide energy consumption, and CO
2
emissions per capita. To limit the usage of non-reusable components and the amount of garbage that must be transferred at the end of a product’s life cycle, longer-lasting electrical domestic appliances are a pillar of the circular economy. In recent years, the complexity of printed circuit boards (PCBs) used in the manufacture of modern electrical devices has increased, leading to an increase in device failures. This study focuses on the maintenance and recycling of domestic electrical appliance components and printed circuit boards. The proposed methodology for PCB repair is defined as a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) problem implemented in MATLAB environment and successfully tested to a variety of domestic appliances such as refrigerator, dishwasher and washing machine. The possibility of recycling metal parts of electronic components, which were replaced after PCBs’ repair was also studied. Metals’ percentage concentration of PCB electronic components for three customer’s budgets considering metals and valuable metals recovery as given from the corresponding average metal recovery and calculated from different recycling procedures presented in the literature. The results of the proposed procedure in terms of valuable metals gave 38.4078 ppm of silver. We also compared the suggested procedure with other works in terms of environmental perspective considering four measures, namely the gross energy requirement (GER), the global warming potential (GWP), the acidification potential (AP), and the solid waste burden (SWB). In terms of economic perspective and considering the existence of silver (Ag) in the electronic components, the recommended method gave comparable amount of money. Finally, a comparison of different recycling works from a technical viewpoint is also conducted. Moreover, a reparability index of domestic electrical appliances is introduced to further quantify the results of the proposed algorithm.
Journal Article
The natural environment as a reservoir of pathogenic and non-pathogenic Acinetobacter species
is a genus of Gram-negative bacteria, which are oxidase-negative, exhibiting a twitching motility under a magnifying lens. Besides being important soil microorganisms, due to their contribution to the soil fertility,
species, particularly
, hold a prominent place within the genus because, it is the most virulent among the other species, causing varying degrees of human infections in clinical environments. However, results of different research have shown that
species can be isolated from such natural environments as surface water, wastewater and sewage, healthy human skin, plant, animal and food material as well as domestic appliances. The presence of some other
species in the natural environment has been associated with beneficial roles including soil improvement, detoxification of oil spillages and as microflora in human and plant bodies. In this paper, we carried out an overview of various natural ecological niches as reservoirs of pathogenic and non-pathogenic
species.
Journal Article
Americanization Through Innovation: Polish American Women, Domestic Appliances, and the Household Revolution Debate, 1900–40
For Polish-American women, household appliances—promoted in Polish-language magazines in the United States in 1930s—were not merely labor-saving tools, but symbols of Americanization and social mobility. Revisiting Ruth Schwartz Cowan's argument that the domestic technological revolution primarily benefited middle-class women, this article examines the experiences of immigrant and second-generation Polish-American women in early twentieth-century and interwar Chicago. While Cowan highlights the increased expectations these technologies imposed on women, this article demonstrates how they facilitated Polish-American women's integration into American consumer culture and adaptation of American values. Drawing on oral histories and advertisements, this article explores the intersection of gender, class, and ethnicity in shaping immigrant women's interactions with modern domestic technology.
Journal Article
Review of results on smart‐meter privacy by data manipulation, demand shaping, and load scheduling
Simple analysis of energy consumption patterns recorded by smart meters can be used to deduce household occupancy. With access to higher‐resolution smart‐meter readings, we can infer more detailed information about the household including the use of individual electric appliances through non‐intrusive load monitoring techniques. The extent of privacy concerns caused by smart meters has proved to an obstacle in the roll‐out of smart meters in some countries. This highlights the need for investigating smart‐meter privacy. Mechanisms for ensuring smart‐meter privacy fall in broad categories of data manipulation, demand shaping, and load scheduling. In smart‐meter data manipulation, the smart meter collects real, potentially high‐resolution data about the energy consumption within the house. This data is then manipulated before communication with to utility providers and retailers. The manipulation could be non‐stochastic, such as aggregation, binning, and down‐sampling, or stochastic, such as additive noise. In demand shaping and load scheduling, smart‐meter readings are communicated without any interference but the consumption is manipulated by renewable energy sources, batteries, or shifting loads to render non‐intrusive load monitoring ineffective. In this study, the author reviews these approaches and presents several methods relying on homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, information theory, and statistics for ensuring privacy.
Journal Article
Do-it-yourself Digital: the Production Boundary, the Productivity Puzzle and Economic Welfare
Part of the debate about the 'productivity puzzle' concerns potential mismeasurement of GDP due to digital activities. This paper discusses some measurement issues arising from digitally-enabled substitutions in activity across the conventional production boundary. Production boundary issues are not new, as conventionally defined GDP statistics account for the monetary cost but not the time cost of consumption and production. This means that changes in the way in which time is allocated between market and home production affect measured growth and productivity, as well as economic welfare. Just as technological innovation in domestic appliances led to a substitution from home production into market consumption in the second half of the 20th century, today's digital innovations are driving some reverse substitution out of the market into home production. Statistical agencies do not currently collect the data needed to measure the scale of the switch, but the available evidence suggests that it may be enough to make a contribution to understanding the current productivity puzzle.
Journal Article
A Novel ILP Formulation for PCB Maintenance Considering Electrical Measurements and Aging Factors: A “Right to Repair” Approach
The design of longer-lasting products, such as domestic electric appliances, is a key-stone approach of the circular economy to reduce the use of non-reusable materials and the number of wastes to be managed at the end of the product’s life as well as to extend it. The manufacturing of modern electric appliances includes the incorporation of printed circuit boards (PCBs). PCBs provide mechanical support and electrically connect electrical or electronic components using conductive trackpads and other features etched from one or more sheet layers of copper laminated onto and/or between sheet layers of a non-conductive substrate. This paper proposes a PCB maintenance framework, fully compliant with the “Right to Repair” concept, considering the impact of their aging failures based on measurements made on them, as well as the repair and replacement costs of their components. Herein, we present an algorithm that assesses the problem of handling the repair and replacement cost corresponding to specific failures while ensuring that the total cost of repair does not exceed a predefined value. This is achieved through an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation which maximizes the benefit to the life expectancy, Li, of an appliance, constrained by a customer’s limited budget. The proposed methodology is tested with different PCBs and considers different types of appliances. More specifically, two cases concerning PCBs of washing and dishwasher machines are studied to examine the dependency of the solutions on the aging rate of their various components. The simulation results show that considering a medium budget, after 3 years, we can achieve a health benefit of 92.4% for a washing machine’s PCB, while for a dishwasher’s PCB, the health benefit drops to 86.3%.
Journal Article