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Chemical Engineering as a General Purpose Technology
... 1 Originally used in the petrochemical and heavy chemical industries, chemical engineering has advanced rapidly with applications in various industries, including biomedicine, environmental systems, complex systems, new materials, and climate change. 2 Another example of a chemical process of great social importance is the development of antibiotics, vaccines, and immunology, which gives humanity better control over microbial diseases and allows for longer and healthier human lives. 3 In addition, understanding semiconductor materials and their incredible precision in mass production is the foundation of modern microelectronics, computer science, and the World Wide Web. ...
... Many processes should work steadily or in a state that meets the industry's needs, such as budget, output, safety, and other quality goals. (2) Tracking consists of moving the process from one state of operation to a new one. Sometimes, changing how a process works can be necessary for several reasons, including economics, product specifications, operational limitations, environmental regulations, consumer/customer specifications, and safety precautions, among others. ...
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A hybrid control framework is proposed as an alternative for long time delays in chemical processes. The hybrid approach mixes the numerical methods in an internal mode control (IMC) structure, which uses the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to improve the adjustment of the controller parameters. Simulation tests are carried out on linear systems of high order and inverse response, both with dominant delay, and tests on a nonlinear process (chemical reactor). The performance of the proposed controller is stable and satisfactory despite nonlinearities in various operating conditions, set-point changes, process disturbances, and modeling errors. In addition, experimental tests were performed on a setup composed of two heaters and two temperature sensors mounted on an Arduino microcontroller-based board called the Temperature Control Laboratory (TCLab), with an additional software delay introduced. The merits and drawbacks of each scheme are analyzed using radar charts, comparing the control methods with different performance measures for set-point and disturbance changes. Furthermore, the new controller uses PSO to improve the tuning parameters.
... On the other hand, academics that contribute to technology transfer maintain that collaboration with industry complements their own academic research, obtains funding and equipment for projects, and provides new research ideas [84]. Ideas from the industry can also expand traditional research agendas, benefiting the overall scientific performance of researchers [85]. Researchers who engage in university-industry collaborations are more productive, publish more papers, and receive more citations FIGURE 12 Overlay visualization of keyword co-occurrence FIGURE 13 Density visualization of keyword co-occurrence than their peers. ...
As university-industry collaborative innovation becomes an important driving force for technological development, the role of individuals in promoting knowledge production and innovation performance is becoming increasingly prominent. Research on individuals in this field has attracted a wide range of attention from scholars, however, scientometric analysis and visualization are inadequate. This study was based on scientific publications from 2000 to 2022 obtained from the Web of Science database. The Bibliometrix-R package and VOSviewer software were used to conduct quantitative analysis and visualization of bibliometric indicators, and to explore the current progress and leading trends of research on university-industry collaborative innovation of individuals. The results show growing academic interest in this topic, with the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy being the most productive countries, and the geographical scope of research expanding to emerging economies. The current research focuses on the channels, attitudes, and influencing factors of different individuals in collaborative innovation, as well as their relationship with scientific productivity. Through scientometric analysis, it is possible to intuitively understand the scientific performance, core journals, author clusters, collaborative networks, research hotspots and thematic evolution, which helps to systematically recognize and focus research in this field, and provides a holistic view and potential directions for future research.
... In particular, we surmise that the skills content of the workforce is a reliable indicator of the knowledge that is relevant to an industry at any time. Accordingly, as industry needs evolve over time the occupational structures and the relevant skills are, so to speak, engaged in an open-ended chase along the trajectory of knowledge growth which, as argued elsewhere, calls upon institutional responses to fill emergent skill gaps (Rosenberg, 1998; Vona and Consoli, 2015). In this view evolving skill structures are both the cause and the effect of shifting industrial regimes based on the generation, adaptation and diffusion of useful knowledge. ...
This paper proposes an empirical study of the skill repertoires of 290 sectors in the United States over the period 2002–2011. We use information on employment structures and job content of occupations to flesh out structural characteristics of industry-specific know-how. The exercise of mapping the skills structures embedded in the workforce yields a taxonomy that discloses novel nuances on the organization of industry. In so doing we also take an initial step towards the integration of labour and employment in the area of innovation studies.
... Thus, the potential existed for a separate disintegrated design industry that could allow the acquisition of this knowledge to be shared across multiple plants. As Rosenberg (1994 Rosenberg ( , 1998) points out, this potential was not immediately realized because it required the creation of a new market boundary ---identifying exactly what services specialized engineering firms would provide in plant design. Ultimately, however, specialized engineering firms did emerge. ...
Contractual theories of vertical integration derive firm boundaries as an efficient response to market transaction costs. These theories predict a relationship between underlying features of transactions and observed integration decisions. There has been some progress in testing these predictions, but less progress in quantifying their importance. One difficulty is that empirical applications often must consider firm structure together with industry structure. Research in industrial organization frequently has adopted this perspective, emphasizing how scale and scope economies, and strategic considerations, influence patterns of industry integration. But this research has paid less attention to contractual or organizational details, so that these two major lines of research on vertical integration have proceeded in parallel with only rare intersection. We discuss the value of combining different viewpoints from organizational economics and industrial organization.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Being integral to the fossil-based energy order and as a key driver of multiple and intersecting ecological crises, the petrochemical industry faces increasing pressures to transform. This paper examines how major petrochemical companies navigate these pressures. Drawing from literatures on discursive power, narratives, and neoGramscian political economy, we introduce the concept of narrative realignment as a nuanced iteration of corporate discursive power that reframes problems of and solutions to green transitions. Specifically, we identify and explore common transition-related narratives, analysing climate and sustainability communications from the largest producers in the petrochemical sector. We argue that these strategic narratives portray the petrochemical industry as key to a successful transition and fend off criticisms by reducing them to misunderstandings. This framing works to reduce pressures for deep mitigation while repositioning the industry as part of the solution. Building on these findings, we demonstrate how petrochemical transition narratives relate to but also diverge from the position of fossil fuel extractors. Despite relying on fossil feedstock and being solidly placed in the fossil economy, petrochemical majors increasingly focus on repositioning themselves proactively as transition enablers. The argument illustrates the work of downstream actors to legitimize the existing energy order.
The 19th- and early 20th-century history of US university research in agriculture, aviation, and chemicals illustrates how
universities assumed central roles not only in advancing the frontier of knowledge but also in pioneering new means for diffusing
and exploiting this knowledge. We highlight features of the engineering knowledge of this period that distinguished it from
scientific knowledge, the interplay between public and private initiatives that supported changes in the roles of universities,
and the contemporary implications of this history.
The creation of spin-off companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these “university” spin-offs like industry start-ups. However, when university spin-offs involve an employment transition by a researcher from the not-for-profit sector, the creation of a university spin-off is likely to impose a higher social cost than the creation of an industry start-up. To offset this higher social cost, university spin-offs must produce a larger stream of social benefits than industry start-ups, a performance premium. This paper outlines the arguments explaining why the social costs of entrepreneurship are likely to be higher for academic entrepreneurs, and empirically investigates the existence of a performance premium using a sample of German start-up companies. We find that university spin-offs exhibit a performance premium of 3.4 % points higher employment growth over industry start-ups. The analysis also shows that the performance premium varies across types of academic entrepreneurs and founders’ academic disciplines.
The process of technological change takes a wide variety of forms. Propositions that may be accurate when referring to the pharmaceutical industry may be totally inappropriate when applied to the aircraft industry or to computers or forest products. The central theme of Nathan Rosenberg's new book is the idea that technological changes are often 'path dependent', in the sense that their form and direction tend to be influenced strongly by the particular sequence of earlier events out of which a new technology has emerged. The book advances the understanding of technological change by explictly recognising its essential diversity and path-dependent nature. Individual chapters explore the particular features of new technologies in different historical and sectoral contexts. This book presents a unique account of how technological change is generated and the processes by which improved technologies are introduced.
It has long been assumed that product innovations are typically developed by product manufacturers. Because this assumption deals with the basic matter of who the innovator is, it has inevitably had a major impact on innovation-related research, on firms' management of research and development, and on government innovation policy. However, it now appears that this basic assumption is often wrong. In this book I begin by presenting a series of studies showing that the sources of innovation vary greatly. In some fields, innovation users develop most innovations. In others, suppliers of innovation-related components and materials are the typical sources of innovation. In still other fields, conventional wisdom holds and product manufacturers are indeed the typical innovators. Next, I explore why this variation in the functional sources of innovation occurs and how it might be predicted. Finally, I propose and test some implications of replacing a manufacturer-as-innovator assumption with a view of the innovation process as predictably distributed across users, manufacturers, suppliers, and others. Keywords: innovation, innovators, user innovation
The origins of chemical engineering can be linked to the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century in Europe and the United States (1–4) and the sociopolitical changes following the 1848 revolution in France and Germany (5–6). No doubt one can claim that chemical engineering was practiced even by the ancient Greeks and Romans when they were making soap or wine, or treating ores in Lavrion or Sicily.
Several recent developments will increase the trend toward ambulatory laparo/endoscopic surgery. By using endoscopic techniques, nongeneral anesthesia, and fentanyl patches to control postoperative pain, these procedures are performed safely without admitting the patient to hospital.