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Abstract This paper investigates the issue of remanufacturing in a dual-channel supply chain. The manufacturer can produce/remanufacture the products and sell them at the same price through his own direct channel or a retail channel. Based on the cap-and-trade regulation, we construct two models with and without remanufacturing to obtain the optimal levels of carbon emission reduction and pricing strategies. The results indicate that remanufacturing can effectively improve the level of carbon emission reduction, and it is profitable to the manufacturer and the retailer. Furthermore, with remanufacturing, we investigate the effect of product promotion where the manufacturer can promote via direct channel (manufacturer's promotion), and the retailer can promote via retail channel (retailer's promotion). With the manufacturer's promotion, the results show that both the level of carbon emission reduction and profit of the manufacturer increase, but the retailer's profit decreases. On the other hand, the retailer's promotion can improve the profits of the retailer and the manufacturer when more consumers prefer the retail channel. Finally, we provide more managerial insights in the sensitivity analysis and extension parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental pollution has become a major threat to the survival and health of human beings, and has attracted the worldwide attention. With the implementation of low-carbon policies, how to change marketing strategy is a realistic and serious problem of enterprises. This paper examines the manufacturer's channel selection and emission reduction decisions when considering carbon emission constraints. A two-echelon supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer under the cap-and-trade regulation is explored. Non-perishable products' and perishable products' carbon emissions are distinguished according to their sales channels. The results provide useful insights for supply chain members. Firstly, the results show that products' properties and consumers' channel preference are key factors affecting manufacturer's channel selection. When consumers prefer online shopping, the manufacturer, who produces perishable/non-perishable products, should choose single online channel structure to maximize his profit. But, this choice cannot make as same contributions to the environment if the manufacturer produces perishable product as that under retail channel. Secondly, the results demonstrated that under cap-and-trade regulation, the channel conflict appears to have abated somewhat. The retailer can accommodate the additional online channel under certain conditions. Additionally, numerical results further illustrate the following insights from the respective of the government: It is more effective to set larger carbon quotas and encourage the manufacturer to develop a dual-channel mode when not too many consumers prefer to online channel. With more and more consumers preferring to online shopping, it can formulate more stringent emission control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To efficiently separate essential oil from the roots and rhizomes of Asarum heterotropoides var. mandshuricum , a modified dynamic nitrogen-protected microwave-assisted hydrodistillation connected liquid-liquid extraction (DNMHDLLE) technique was developed. In addition to collect essential oil at the bottom of hydrosol in the conventional oil-water separation process, another extraction process was realized for extracting some essential oil components from the hydrosol using a small amount of organic solvents, which can significantly enhance the essential oil yield, effectively reduce the organic content in wastewater and its further disposal burden. The addition of glass beads as the packing in the second separation column had a positive influence on the essential oil yield. After the investigation using a single factor experiment and a response surface analysis, the optimum conditions were determined to be 28 min microwave irradiation time, 11 mL/g liquid-solid ratio, and 550 W microwave irradiation power. Under the optimum conditions, the yields of A. heterotropoides var. mandshuricum essential oil obtained in the first and second separation columns were 1.92 ± 0.07% and 0.50 ± 0.02%, respectively. Using GC-MS analysis, the essential oil containing oxy-compounds with a higher relative content was separated in the second separation column. In addition, the proposed method was compared with other techniques, including efficiency, environmental impact and economic effect, which indicated that the developed technique can effectively improve the essential oil yield, and take full advantage of raw material resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essential oil was separated from the fresh leaves of Phellodendron amurense Rupr. by solvent-free microwave-assisted distillation in a rotating state with n-hexane extraction and LiCl addition, which ingeniously designed lithium salt addition, rotation unit, and n-hexane extraction effectively improved the yield and separation rate of essential oils. The factors that may affect essential oils yield were screened and optimized by single factor optimization, response surface methodology, and kinetic model to obtain the optimal conditions for the separation of essential oils by this method, which were LiCl content of 8%FW, microwave irradiation power 600 W and microwave irradiation time 40 min. And the yield of essential oils is 2.39 ± 0.12 mg/g in the optimum conditions by this method, which is highly consistent with the predictions from the response surface method (2.39 mg/g) and the first-order kinetic model (2.42 ± 0.04 mg/g). This method effectively ensures the uniform heating of the plant material and the rapid overflow of the essential oil by employing the rotating unit and the addition of LiCl, which effectively avoids the loss of the heat-sensitive components in the essential oil. Moreover, the solvent-free distillation of this method highly improves the heating rate, and the added LiCl can also be effectively recovered and reused, which effectively reduces the economic cost, and environmental stress and will result in a cleaner product. And an accurate quantitative analysis method of essential oils was established by n-hexane extraction-ultraviolet spectroscopy, which not only effectively avoided the loss of water-soluble components but also provided a new strategy for quantitative analysis of essential oils. In addition, the results of the kinetic model indicated that the separation rate constant of essential oils in this method was 1.34 times that of microwave-assisted hydrodistillation and 5.05 times that of conventional hydrodistillation. Therefore, this method is an efficient, green, and clean essential oil preparation method, which is very promising to replace existing methods in the future. [Display omitted] • The innovative design of the rotating unit ensures that the biomass is heated evenly. • LiCl addition increases the conductivity to accelerate the heating rate. • n-Hexane extraction to develop a new quantitative analysis method for essential oils. • CO 2 release and economic cost of this method are only 0.24 times that of hydrodistillation. • The essential oil yield of this method is 1.5 times that of the traditional hydrodistillation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CaO–MgO–Al 2 O 3 –SiO 2 (CMAS) glass-ceramics are a new type of building decoration materials. They can be prepared using silicate-bearing metallurgical slags as raw materials for both economic and environmental benefits. This study offered a systematic review of preparation of CMAS glass-ceramics from various metallurgical slags based on analyses of characteristics, preparation methods of slag-based glass-ceramics, and the influence of heat treatment, chemical components and nucleating agents on the phase composition, microstructure and properties of glass-ceramics. It was found that a large number of metallurgical slags, including blast furnace slag (BFS), steel slag (SS), stainless-steel slag (SSS), electric furnace ferronickel slag (EFFS), copper slag (CS), ferromanganese slag (FS) and lead fuming slag (LFS), have the potential to serve as the main raw materials for producing CMAS glass-ceramics because of their chemical composition similarities to the products. However, the minor or residual elements, such as chromium, in the slags may directly affect the properties of the glass-ceramics mainly because of their impacts on the nucleation and crystallization in parent glasses which are in need of control. Special attention of this review was devoted to the challenges from the aspects of cost, safety and diversification in preparing the glass-ceramics from metallurgical slags and to corresponding solutions for maximizing utilization of the wastes with desirable product quality. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper designs a novel maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique for centralized thermoelectric generation (TEG) system under heterogeneous temperature difference (HeTD). Since the HeTD can result in multiple local maximum power points (LMPPs) for centralized TEG system, a fast atom search optimization (FASO) is designed to approximate the global maximum power point (GMPP) from multiple LMPPs. In order to accelerate the convergence for a high quality solution, the Euclidian distance ratio of the original atom search optimization (ASO) is employed to adaptively update according to the dynamic optimization results, as well as for the number of neighbours for each atom. Through case studies such as start-up test, step variation of temperature, stochastic temperature change, and analyse of sensitivity are carried out, in which the practicability and superiority of FASO are compared with that of MPPT method based on a single LMPP and four meta-heuristic algorithms. Simulation results show that the energy output produced by FASO ranges from 101.64% to 451.49% to the alternatives. Finally, through hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiment based on a dSpace, the feasibility of the hardware realization is confirmed, in which the difference between simulation results and HIL experiment results is less than 2.3%. • A novel MPPT model of centralized thermoelectric generation system is established. • Heterogeneous temperature difference causes multiple local maximum power points. • A novel fast atom search optimization is designed for MPPT of centralized TEG system. • Adynamic balance between exploration and exploitation is constructed in FASO. • FASObased MPPTobtainsalarger energy output than other five comparative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]