In pursuit of green technology innovations, the energy industry is showing an interest in sustainable sources such as wind energy generation. The Saudi Arabian energy industry has a 2030 target to generate and transmit electricity to major customers nationwide and other neighboring Gulf countries. However, the selection of wind energy power plant locations is a concern because the decision process involves social, technological, economical, and environmental factors. The originality of this study lies in (1) proposing an integrated quantitative and qualitative multi-criteria decision making framework for selecting wind-energy power plant locations; (2) applying the proposed framework in the context of the energy industry in a gulf region country and investigating expert-based and entropy-based criterion weight assignments; (3) choosing five possible alternative wind energy power plant locations with 17 response criteria for each alternative to help decision makers identify the best possible alternative; and (4) establishing the superiority of one alternative over another (if it exists). The presented approach extends considerable support to the comparing and ranking of alternatives along with its validation and sensitivity analysis. Based on the proposed multi-criteria decision-making approach, an appropriate wind energy power plant location has been successfully selected among the five alternatives.

Nickel-based superalloys exhibit excellent high temperature strength, high temperature corrosion and oxidation resistance and creep resistance. They are widely used in high temperature applications in aerospace, power and petrochemical industries. The need for economical and efficient usage of materials often necessitates the joining of dissimilar metals. In this study, dissimilar welding between two different nickel-based superalloys, Inconel 718 and Inconel 600, was attempted using rotary friction welding. Sound metallurgical joints were produced without any unwanted Laves or delta phases at the weld region, which invariably appear in fusion welds. The weld thermal cycle was found to result in significant grain coarsening in the heat effected zone (HAZ) on either side of the dissimilar weld interface due to the prevailing thermal cycles during the welding. However, fine equiaxed grains were observed at the weld interface due to dynamic recrystallization caused by severe plastic deformation at high temperatures. In room temperature tensile tests, the joints were found to fail in the HAZ of Inconel 718 exhibiting good ultimate tensile strength (759 MPa) without a significant loss of tensile ductility (21%). A scanning electron microscopic examination of the fracture surfaces revealed fine dimpled rupture features, suggesting a fracture in a ductile mode.

Supply chain agility and sustainability is an essential element for the long-term survival and success of a manufacturing organization. Agility is an organization’s ability to respond rapidly to customers’ dynamic demands and volatile market changes. In a dynamic business environment, manufacturing firms demand agility to be evaluated to support any alarming decision. Sustainability is an aspect to sustain collaboration, value creation, and survival of firms under a dynamic competitive business scenario. Agility is a capability that drives competitiveness to foster sustainability aspects. The purpose of this article is to consider and evaluate the supply chain behavior within the context of Saudi enterprises. The efficacy and relevance of this model were explored through a case study conducted in a Saudi dairy manufacturing corporation. Owing to the complexity and a large number of calculations that are required for evaluating the agility of the supply chain, a decision support system was proposed as a tool to assess the supply chain and identifying barriers to a strategic sustainable solution for a specific organizational target. The decision support system is extensive as it contains six separate agility enablers and ninety-three agility attributes for the supply chain. The assessment was carried out using a fuzzy multi-criteria method. It combines the performance rating and importance weight of each agile supply chain-enabler-attribute. To achieve and sustain local and global success, the case organization strove to become a major local and global manufacturer to satisfy its customers, reduce its time to market, lower its total ownership costs, and boost its overall competitiveness through improving its agility across supply chain activities to foster sustainability for a manufacturing organization located in Saudi Arabia.

Healthcare services have now become a fundamental requirement for all individuals owing to rising pollution levels and shifting lifestyles brought on by fast modernization. The hospital is a specialized healthcare facility where doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals offer their services. Academics and professionals have emphasized green operation initiatives such as green design, green purchasing, green supply chain, and green manufacturing to increase public awareness of environmental problems affecting company operations associated with healthcare for the quality of life. The purpose of this research is to use total interpretive structural modeling and MICMAC (matrix cross multiplication applied to a classification) analysis to investigate and analyze the elements impacting green operations strategies in healthcare. The data are gathered using a closed-ended questionnaire together with a scheduled interview. The components’ interactions are explored using the total interpretive structural modeling technique, and the MICMAC analysis is used to rank and categorize the green operation strategy variables. The study is a novel effort to address and focus on stakeholders, vision and structure, resources, and capabilities. Green operations strategies have only been the subject of a small number of studies in the past, and those studies were mostly addressed at manufacturing-specific green strategies. Thus, by promoting energy efficiency programs, green building design, alternative sources of energy, low-carbon transportation, local food, waste reduction, and water conservation, the health sector can develop multiple key strategies to become more climate-friendly with significant health, environmental, and social co-benefits for quality of life.

In the present study, a friction welding process was adopted to join dissimilar alloys of Ti-Al-4V to Nitinol. The effect of friction welding on the evolution of welded macro and microstructures and their hardnesses and tensile properties were studied and discussed in detail. The macrostructure of Ti-6Al-4V and Nitinol dissimilar joints revealed flash formation on the Ti-6Al-4V side due to a reduction in flow stress at high temperatures during friction welding. The optical microstructures revealed fine grains near the Ti-6Al-4V interface due to dynamic recrystallization and strain hardening effects. In contrast, the area nearer to the nitinol interface did not show any grain refinement. This study reveals that the formation of an intermetallic compound (Ti₂Ni) at the weld interface resulted in poor ultimate tensile strength (UTS) and elongation values. All tensile specimens failed at the weld interface due to the formation of intermetallic compounds.

The manifestation of new part designs and continuously changing market demands as well as the requirements of new functions and technologies often results in higher material cost, lesser machine utilization, and extensive wastage of energy. As a consequence, companies across the world are striving for sustainable manufacturing, which can ensure flexibility as well as adaptability, with higher productivity and lesser wastage of resources. The dynamic and competitive nature of the world market emphasizes the importance of economically sustainable setups, such as reconfigurable cellular manufacturing systems (RCMSs). Indeed, among several cutting-edge strategies, the RCMS is the most prominent owing to its versatility, rationality, and resilience. However, one of the limitations associated with RCMS is the evaluation and selection of the best configuration that can meet abrupt changes and achieve manufacturing sustainability. Therefore, organizations intending to reconfigure have to address the issue of evaluating all possible alternatives and selecting the best one using a well-defined methodology. This paper focuses on evaluating and finding the best configuration using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches depending on PROMETHEE and VIKOR. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is utilized to compute the weights of various criteria because it also considers any uncertainty and vagueness existing in the problem. The assessing attributes in this study are selected by keeping in mind the objective of sustainable manufacturing. The two MCDM methods are utilized for ranking different configurations to ascertain the results obtained from the other. The study accomplished in this paper is related to manufacturing setups that need to be reconfigured. The number of manufacturing configurations is determined, and simulation models are established for each configuration. The simulation outcomes are examined using the FAHP-PROMETHEE and FAHP-VIKOR to assess the appropriateness of each configuration depending on the identified performance measures. The results of the experiments show the importance of employing MCDM in RCMS to achieve sustainable manufacturing and determining the most effective setup.