The implementation of sustainable systems is an essential requirement in modern manufacturing, in order to minimize the environmental and health concerns, and conserves energy and natural resources. The sustainable manufacturing approach is identified through three main levels, namely: product, process, and system scales. The interactions among these levels provide the required sustainable target. To achieve a sustainable manufacturing system, it is very important to understand and define the concepts and needs related to the sustainability approach. In addition, defining and understanding the implementation steps as well as the assessment method to build a sustainable manufacturing system is required. In this work, a study discussing the sustainable manufacturing approach is presented in terms of concepts, implementation steps, and assessment methods.

A primary concern of conventional Portland cement concrete (PCC) is associated with the massive amount of global cement and natural coarse aggregates (NCA) consumption, which causes depletion of natural resources on the one hand and ecological problems on the other. As a result, the concept of green concrete (GC), by replacing cement with supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) such as ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS), fly ash (FA), silica fume (SF), and metakaolin (MK), or replacing NCA with recycled coarse aggregates, can play an essential role in addressing the environmental threat of PCC. Currently, there is a growing body of literature that emphasizes the importance of implementing GC in concrete applications. Therefore, this paper has conducted a systematic literature review through the peer-reviewed literature database Scopus. A total of 114 papers were reviewed that cover the following areas: (1) sustainability benefits of GC, (2) mechanical behavior of GC in terms of compressive strength, (3) durability properties of GC under several environmental exposures, (4) structural performance of GC in large-scale reinforced beams under shear and flexure, and (5) analytical investigation that compares the GC shear capacities of previously tested beams with major design codes and proposed models. Based on this review, the reader will be able to select the optimum replacement level of cement with one of the SCMs to achieve a certain concrete strength range that would suit a certain concrete application. Also, the analysis of durability performance revealed that the addition of SCMs is not recommended in concrete exposed to a higher temperature than 400 °C. Moreover, combining GGBFS with FA in a concrete mix was noticed to be superior to PCC in terms of long-term resistance to sulfate attack. The single most striking observation to emerge from the data comparison of the experimentally tested beams with the available concrete shear design equations is that the beams having up to 70% of FA as a replacement to OPC or up to 100% of RCA as a replacement to NCA were conservatively predicted by the equations of Japan Society of Civil Engineers (JSCE-1997), the American Concrete Institute (ACI 318-19), and the Canadian Standards Association (CSA-A23.3-14).

This paper investigates the effect of filler content on the mechanical properties of cotton fiber (CF) on the CF/PP and CF/PVC composites under quasi-static loading. For this purpose, experimental tensile tests were carried out on dog-bone specimens, cut out from hot and cold press molded square plates of different fiber weight contents. The results obtained show that the filler content appears to have a strong influence on mechanical energy absorption, and failure characteristics. It was also found that the stiffness for both sets of material increases with the addition of filler. On the other hand, the ductility for both sets of the material increases with the addition of filler. The microscopic morphology study indicates that CF/PP possesses a glossy surface appearance compared to CF/PVC, which possesses a porous surface. Micro-scale damage characteristics from tensile tests indicate that material experienced shear failure, matrix cracking, fiber breakage, fiber fracture, and fiber pullout. The phenomenon of matrix crazing experienced by CF/PP composites was also observed.

In this paper, hybrid composite plates for ballistic protection were investigated experimentally and numerically, with a target to reduce the weight of currently used body armor inserts and, at the same time, satisfy the requirements of the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ) ballistic protection standards. The current study has three phases to improve the ballistic plate’s energy absorption capability. The first phase is devoted to studying the effect of the material types, including three different fibers: carbon fiber, date palm fiber, and Kevlar fiber. The second phase is dedicated to studying the effect of hybridization within layers. The two previous phases’ results were analyzed to optimize the material based on the hybrid composite ballistic plate’s maximum energy absorption capability. The commercial finite element software package LS-DYNA was employed for numerical modeling and simulation. The hybrid composite ballistic plate could absorb more impact energy than the non-hybrid Kevlar plate with the same area density from the numerical simulation results. This study provides lighter-weight ballistic inserts with a high protection level, making movement easier for the wearer. The numerical results were verified by comparing results of a plate made of 40 layers of Kevlar with an actual ballistic test. The results indicated that the simulation results were conservative compared to the ballistic test.

The aim of this paper is to establish a reliable model that provides the best fit to the specific behavior of the flow stresses of the 10%Cr steel alloy at the time of hot deformation. Modified Johnson–Cook and strain-compensated Arrhenius-type (phenomenological models), in addition to two Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models were established with the view toward investigating their stress prediction performances. The ANN models were trained using Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCG) and Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithms. The prediction accuracy of the established models was evaluated using the following well-known statistical parameters: (a) correlation coefficient (R), (b) Average Absolute Relative Error (AARE), (c) Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and Relative Error (RE). The results showed that both of the modified Johnson–Cook and strain-compensated Arrhenius models could not competently predict the flow behavior. On the contrary, the results indicated that the two proposed ANN models precisely predicted the flow stress values and that the LM-trained ANN provided a superior performance over the SCG-trained model, as it yielded an RMSE of as low as 0.441 MPa.

In this study, glass fibre reinforced (GFRP) polyvinyl chloride (PVC) tubes were subjected to quasi-static axial compression tests to determine their crashworthiness performance. To this end, this study employed GFRP/PVC tubes with four different fibre orientations, 45°, 55°, 65° and 90°. A five-axis filament winding machine was used to fabricate the tubes. The results show that there was a considerable increase in all crashworthiness characteristics due to GFRP reinforcement. For the GFRP/PVC composite tubes of different fibre orientations, the load-bearing capacity, crush force efficiency and energy absorption capability generally improve with increasing fibre orientation. The GFRP/PVC 45° specimen was a notable exception as it exhibited the best specific energy absorption capacity and a crushing force efficiency that was only slightly less than for the GFRP/PVC 90° specimen.