Browsing by Author "Makatsoris, Charalampos"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Consumer driven new product development in future re-distributed models of sustainable production and consumption
    (Elsevier, 2017-07-11) Jreissat, Mohannad; Isaev, Svetlin; Moreno, Mariale; Makatsoris, Charalampos
    The customer as co-creator of products is a grand challenge the entire consumer products manufacturing industry is facing. The design, manufacture and delivery of mass personalised consumer products must not only meet customer preferences but must be produced economically and sustainably too. Re-Distributed Manufacturing (RDM) has the potential to disrupt the way products are designed, produced and consumed products across their entire lifecycle and will allow the creation of disruptive business models and entirely new supply chain structures. New structures of design and manufacturing can enable large reductions in resource consumption by limiting waste in a supply chain (e.g. reducing transport distances) and through addressing the flows of resources at critical times in the lifecycle of products. It can also enable reduction of R&D waste by enabling a more targeted delivery of custom products to meet specific user needs and demands in different contexts and across extended timespans of the product lifecycle. Few manufacturers have started experimenting with open innovation to address the two manufacturing challenges of: (i) the ability to identify rapidly the needs and preferences of different market segments; (ii) the ability to respond quickly and flexibly to those. This paper demonstrates a model-based methodology and information technology to engage consumers at large scales to drive new product and manufacturing process development to address these challenges. An orange beverage has been selected to show that by linking a game-like consumer facing web application and a novel computer driven flow manufacturing system, target sensory attributes obtained by consumer groups can be rapidly translated into a new formulation recipe and its manufacturing process of a beverage that meets those needs and prototyped for that consumer group to evaluate. One can then envisage future scenarios where formulated consumer products are rapidly co-created and produced serving the needs of localised markets.
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    Developing scenarios for product longevity and sufficiency
    (IOS Press, 2017-11-10) Dewberry, E. L.; Sheldrick, Leila; Sinclair, M.; Moreno, Mariale; Makatsoris, Charalampos
    This paper explores the narrative of peoples' relationships with products as a window on understanding the types of innovation that may inform a culture of sufficiency. The work forms part of the ‘Business as Unusual: Designing Products with Consumers in the Loop’ [BaU] project, funded as part of the UK EPSRC-ESRC RECODE network (RECODE, 2016) that aims to explore the potential of re-distributed manufacturing (RdM) in a context of sustainability. This element of the project employed interviews, mapping and workshops as methods to investigate the relationship between people and products across the product lifecycle. A focus on product longevity and specifically the people-product interactions is captured in conversations around product maintenance and repair. In exploring ideas of ‘broken’ we found different characteristics of, and motivations for, repair. Mapping these and other product-people interactions across the product lifecycle indicated where current activity is, who owns such activity (i.e. organisation or individual) where gaps in interactions occur. These issues were explored further in a workshop which grouped participants to look at products from the perspective of one of four scenarios; each scenario represented either short or long product lifespans and different types of people engagement in the design process. The findings help give shape to new scenarios for designing sufficiency-based social models of material flows.
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    The directed assembly grand challenge network
    (Springer, 2017-08-01) Rose, J. A. R.; Raithby, P. R.; Makatsoris, Charalampos
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    Effects of the homopolymer molecular weight on a diblock copolymer in a 3D spherical confinement
    (BMC, 2019-02-14) Ly, Dung Q.; Makatsoris, Charalampos
    The morphologies of a diblock copolymer spherically confined within a homopolymer were investigated by using the static self-consistent field theory method. A homogeneous A-B diblock copolymer sphere was surrounded by a homopolymer C. Upon changing the diblock volume fraction, homopolymer molecular weight and the interaction between the copolymer and its surrounding environment, different morphologies of the sphere were observed. Our calculations confirmed that when the homopolymer molecular weight was high a complete macrophase separation between the copolymer and the homopolymer was obtained. However, when the homopolymer molecular weight was low the homopolymer penetrated into the copolymer microdomains, diluting the diblock copolymer and reduced the interaction between the diblock copolymer segments and hence preventing them from segregating.