Advances in permanent magnets, electronics and design techniques over the past thirty years have led to the development of a new generation of electric machines. Sintered rare-earth neodymium–iron–boron magnets have a magnetic energy product up to an order of magnitude larger than those of...

Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs), used in gas turbine blades, are exposed to oxidation and thermal fatigue conditions. The characterization of TBCs was often performed in laboratory experiments, therefore, its detail failure mechanism is not quite obvious. For better understanding of the...

This paper uses semiparametric time-series methods to model the non-linear effects of weather variations on the output growth rate of the construction sector. The study is undertaken at both the annual and quarterly frequencies; the results show that weather shocks have significant effects on...

This paper compares the effects of weather shocks on agricultural production in Britain, France and Germany during the late nineteenth century. Using semi- parametric models to estimate the non-linear agro-weather relationship, we find that weather shocks explain between one and two-thirds of...