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This research focuses on utilizing injection moulding to assess defects in plastic products, including sink marks, shrinkage, and warpages. Process parameters, such as pure cooling time, mould temperature, melt temperature, and pressure holding time, are carefully selected for investigation. A full factorial design of experiments is employed to identify optimal settings. These parameters significantly affect the physical and mechanical properties of the final product. Soft computing methods, such as finite element (FE), help mitigate behaviour by considering different input parameters. A CAD model of a dashboard component integrates into an FE simulation to quantify shrinkage, warpage, and sink marks. Four chosen parameters of the injection moulding machine undergo comprehensive experimental design. Decision tree, multilayer perceptron, long short-term memory, and gated recurrent units models are explored for injection moulding process modelling. The best model estimates defects. Multiple objectives particle swarm optimisation extracts optimal process parameters. The proposed method is implemented in MATLAB, providing 18 optimal solutions based on the extracted Pareto-Front., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Thermal discomfort is one of the main triggers for occupants' interactions with components of the built environment such as adjustments of thermostats and/or opening windows and strongly related to the energy use in buildings. Understanding causes for thermal (dis-)comfort is crucial for design and operation of any type of building. The assessment of human thermal perception through rating scales, for example in post-occupancy studies, has been applied for several decades; however, long-existing assumptions related to these rating scales had been questioned by several researchers. The aim of this study was to gain deeper knowledge on contextual influences on the interpretation of thermal perception scales and their verbal anchors by survey participants. A questionnaire was designed and consequently applied in 21 language versions. These surveys were conducted in 57 cities in 30 countries resulting in a dataset containing responses from 8225 participants. The database offers potential for further analysis in the areas of building design and operation, psycho-physical relationships between human perception and the built environment, and linguistic analyses.