PurposeThe present study is concerned with the determinants of RFID adoption among a group of early standards adopters. Despite the extensive discussion of the technological characteristics and expected benefits of RFID in the literature, only little is known about the drivers and barriers of RFID implementations in practice. This holds particularly for the later stages of the adoption process after an initial decision in favor of the technology was made. This paper aims to fill this gap by an analysis of a set of factors on the adoption of RFID, which have been shown to be relevant for the adoption of other forms of IT, such as ERP systems and EDI.Design/methodology/approachBased on a review of prior works, this paper constructs and empirically tests a structural model including factors related to the technology, the organization, and its environment.FindingsThe results suggest that top management support, perceived technology costs, and forces within the supply chain exert a significant influence on the adoption process. The study also finds that benefit perceptions have a significant but negative influence, which might be explained by the different modes of adopting RFID. The influence of a number of other factors known from the literature could not be supported by the study.Originality/valuePrior works considered factors influencing the initial adoption decision among non‐adopters. In contrast with these, the focus is set on research on early adopters that have already made a decision in favor of RFID standards. The data underlying this study were collected from EPCglobal, an international association of RFID adopters covering the whole supply chain.

The adoption and diffusion of RFID technology take longer time than it was expected years ago. While few industries adopted RFID right away others are reluctant and took up a ‘wait and see’ position. Especially standards play a major role. Even standards are available today, many industries announced additional requirements for their specific processes. As an example we analyze the developments regarding RFID standardization in the automotive industry and identify three central reasons why the adoption and diffusion is slow compared to other industry sectors like retail and consumer goods: (1) Skepticism about EPCglobal and the capability of the Electronic Product Code for processes in the automotive industry, (2) a long lasting standardization process through various national and international committees, and (3) the lack of a mandatory announced by a dominant supply chain partner.

This paper presents the Near Field Communication (NFC) and Electronic Product Code (EPC) technologies. While both are Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies, there are several compatibility issues which could prevent both technologies from achieving their full potential. This paper describes the technologies' common potentials, open issues, and finally the necessary steps to achieve the compatibility of both technologies. According to the ABI Research several billion NFC compatible devices will be shipped to consumers within the next 5 years. This would make them the largest RFID reader infrastructure world wide. A lack of compatibility of item level RFID tags could prevent consumers from reading these tags. The paper can be downloaded from the conference website: http://www.rfidconvocation.eu/papers%20not%20presented.htm

Near Field Communication devices and Electronic Product Code tags are two important RFID based solutions which have matured to market-readiness within the last years. Though both standards are based on the same technological foundation, there are some significant differences as to the goals that their developers intend to achieve through their use. Mobile phones are the most popular personal devices world- wide, with roughly three billion units in operation as of 2006. Market researchers are anticipating that by 2012 20% of all sold phones will be NFC enabled. With 300 million NFC phones sold in 2012, mobile phones would become the largest infrastructure of RFID readers world wide. On the other side, EPC tags will steadily become more available on logistical units and consumer products. The fact that more than a billion consumers might be equipped with NFC enabled mobile phones by 2015 raises the question whether the compatibility of EPC item level tags to these devices would not offer significant benefits. Against this background, this contribution investigates the drivers and barriers of a fusion of NFC and EPC technology, and discusses the resulting potential from a business perspective.

The adoption of newer information technologies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can improve the transparency and therefore the speed and accuracy of information exchange within supply chains. An increase of process efficiency is one of the advantages of RFID. But after many years of hyping the RFID technology it becomes increasingly evident that the actual adoption and diffusion of RFID lags behind the expectations of its optimistic promoters. In our paper we identify factors which are fostering the adoption and diffusion of RFID in a particular industry such as automotive. With a look at the theory of innovation diffusion, reviews of IS and IT diffusion studies, case reports and our practical experience in the automotive industry we extract factors in three categories: (a) innovation characteristic, (b) organizational characteristics and (c) environmental characteristics. The resulting most important factors compatibility, complexity, costs and performance belong to group (a) while the factor top management support belongs to group (b). With the knowledge of these factors, potential users are able to evaluate if it is reasonable to adopt RFID at a certain point of time and furthermore become able to actively influence these factors to increase the rate of diffusion of RFID.

Nitric oxide formation in gas turbine combustion depends on four key factors: flame stabilization, heat transfer, fuel–air mixing and combustion instability. The design of modern gas turbine burners requires delicate compromises between fuel efficiency, emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NO x ) and combustion stability. Burner designs allowing substantial NO x reduction are often prone to combustion oscillations. These oscillations also change the NO x fields. Being able to predict not only the main species field in a burner but also the pollutant and the oscillation levels is now a major challenge for combustion modelling. This must include a realistic treatment of unsteady acoustic phenomena (which create instabilities) and also of heat transfer mechanisms (convection and radiation) which control NO x generation. In this work, large-eddy simulation (LES) is applied to a realistic gas turbine combustion chamber configuration where pure methane is injected through multiple holes in a cone-shaped burner. In addition to a non-reactive simulation, this article presents three reactive simulations and compares them to experimental results. The first reactive simulation neglects effects of cooling air on flame stabilization and heat losses by radiation and convection. The second reactive simulation shows how cooling air and heat transfer affect nitric oxide emissions. Finally, the third reactive simulation shows the effects of combustion instability on nitric oxide emissions. Additionally, the combustion instability is analysed in detail, including the evaluation of the terms in the acoustic energy equation and the identification of the mechanism driving the oscillation. Results confirm that LES of gas turbine combustion requires not only an accurate chemical scheme and realistic heat transfer models but also a proper description of the acoustics in order to predict nitric oxide emissions and pressure oscillation levels simultaneously.

Near Field Communication devices and Electronic Product Code tags are two important RFID based solutions which have matured to market-readiness within the last years. Though both standards are based on the same technological foundation, there are some significant differences as to the goals that their patrons intend to achieve through their use. Mobile phones are the most popular personal devices world wide, with roughly three billion units in operation as of 2006. Market researchers are anticipating that by 2011 30% of all sold phones will be NFC enabled. With 450 million NFC phones sold in 2011, mobile phones would become the largest infrastructure of RFID readers world wide. On the other side, EPC tags will steadily become more available on logistical units and consumer products. The fact that 2 billion consumers might be equipped with NFC enabled mobile phones by 2015 raises the question whether the compatibility of EPC item level tags to these devices does not offer significant benefits. Against this background, this contribution investigates the drivers and barriers of a fusion of NFC and EPC technology, and discusses the resulting potential from a business perspective.

A technical gas turbine combustor has been studied in detail with optical diagnostics for validation of Large-Eddy Simulations (LES). OH* chemiluminescence, OH laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and particle image velocimetry (PIV) have been applied to stable and pulsating flames up to 8 bar. The combination of all results yielded a good insight into the combustion process with this type of burner and forms a data base which was used for the validation of complex numerical combustion simulations. Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) including radiation, convective cooling and air cooling were combined with a reduced chemical scheme that predicts NOx emissions. Good agreement of the calculated flame position and shape with experimental data was found.

The impact of heat transfer modelling on Large-Eddy Simulations of a laboratory scalegasturbineburnerisshown. First,simplemodellingstrategiesforheattransfer are presented: radiation is approximated by an optically thin model and convective heat transfer is modelled by wall functions. Then the configuration, a swirl sta- bilised, lean partially premixed burner including air cooling and fuel injections is detailed. Comparison of two simulations show, that air cooling modifies consider- ably local combustion temperature and flame shape. The radiative and convective heat transfer show equal impact on chamber temperature and therefore on nitric oxide formation. The simulation including all thermal aspects of the configuration matchessignificantlybettertheexperimentaldatathanthesimulationwithoutthem.

An analytical and numerical study has been carried out with the view on the understanding of the physical mechanisms of the mixing process in a gas turbine burner. To this end, three methods at various levels of approximation have been used: At the simplest level an analytical model of the burner flow and the mixing process has been developed. It is demonstrated how this approach can be used to understand basic issues of the fuel-air mixing and how it can be applied as a design tool which guides the optimisation of a fuel injector device. At an intermediate level of approximation, steady-state CFD simulations, based on the k–ε- and RSM-turbulence models are used to describe the mixing process. All steady simulations fail to either predict the recirculation zone or the turbulence level correctly, and can therefore not be expected to capture the mixing correctly. At the most involved level of modelling time-accurate CFD based on unsteady RSM and LES-turbulence models are performed. The simulations show good agreement with experiments (and in the case of LES excellent agreement) for both, velocity and turbulence fields. Mixing predictions close to the fuel injectors suffer from a simplification used in the numerical setup, but the mixing field is predicted very well towards the exit of the burner. The contribution of the asymmetric coherent flow structure (which is associated with the internal recirculation zone) to the mixing process is quantified through a triple decomposition technique.