Selection Process for Expatriates

Selection Process for Expatriates Chapter 2 Literature Review: In this chapter researcher tried to discuss all the related studies which are done in past and are available in literature. A lot of work has been done in the literature on the topic of selection. Before proceeding to the actual topic it is necessary to look at the different methods of selection which an organization uses and see that what are the different techniques and criteria which are used for the selection of staff. 2.1 Selection: Moore (2006) discussed this as the selection is the whole process which includes choosing the right candidate for the position from those persons who have been recruited. This involves testing and evaluating the skills of an individual is required for the particular job. According to Dessler (2000) the selection is the process in which the recruited individual is whittled down by using screening tools like assessment centers, interviews, and different tests. 2.2 Expatriate selection: According to (Dowling, Welch, Schuler, 1999, pg: 154) Multinationals take great care in their selection process, however predicting future performance potential of the concerned staff is challenging at the best of times especially operating in foreign environments adds another level of uncertainty. The expatriate selection process results in higher cost to the multinationals including relocation process, allowance and accommodation apart from the training costs. (Hailey 2000, pg; 90) During the expatriate selection process, 02 conflicting forces operate within the expatriates mind. One that pulls the employee into moving to the new place, the other tends to stop him from going (Baruch 2005, pg 129). 2.3 Importance of an Expatriates and International Assignments: The world is globalizing very rapidly and change has become necessary for the organization to survive and to gain competitive advantage internationally. According to Harris and Brewster, (1999) the rapidly globalizing world has increased the need for the international assignments and many of the organizations started considering international management experience for the top management. So the international assignments are becoming an important part for the success of an organization to gain competitive advantage. As discussed by Chen, Tzeng Tang, 2005 that organizations internationalize their operation to gain success and to increase its market value internationally and for this purpose an organization needs effective expatriate who can perform its task properly. In this new era the importance of expatriate has increased because expatriates are the ones who can give an organization proper international exposure and make the organization successful. 2.4 Selection Process: One of the most studied areas for the expatriate selection is the selection process of the expatriate. The selection of expatriate has always been difficult procedure for the multinational organizations. Swaak quotes one HR executive who said. â€Å"My job is to find people in a hurry.† So this system is highly crisis-oriented and unsophisticated. Swaak, (1995) further confirms the problems for the nature of the selection process. Still and Smith (1997) report the results of Australian research, which shows that there were a number of different ways through which expatriates were selected. They studied that the most impressive and important form of selection or evaluation of the expatriate was recommendation of the person by the line manager including chief executive officer or specialist persons. Mostly expatriates in the multinational organizations in a knee-jerk reaction to the need to fill a new or unexpected vacancies overseas. Actually there are well informed intercultural trainers or a good HR professional who selects the expatriates but basically it is HR department within multinational organization who selects the expatriate finally. Managements choose the most technical and competent candidates which makes the expatriates successful internationally. Shilling, (1993 pg 58) 2.5 Types of selection Process: * Psychometric Tests * Assessment Centers * Coffee machine system 2.5.1 Psychometric Tests: According to Passmore, 2008 Psychometrics are the widely used testing method for the selection of the employee and personal development. The psychological test is always important for the selection of the employee especially for the selection of an international manager. According to the validity of psychological tests is disputed. According to Sparow and Brewster (2007) the psychologists the variation between the different natured job test is very small (Schmidt and Hunter, 1998). According to a survey done by The Graduate Recruitment in 2007 two third or about 67 percent of 219 respondents surveyed said that the results of psychometric test had some influence on recruiting and selection decisions, and 24 percent said that it has strong influence, and only 2 percent said that these test does not have any influence. So the above shows the importance of psychometric tests. According to Sparow and Brewster (2007) psychological assessment increasingly involves the application of tests i n different cultural contexts, either in a single country or different countries. Now a day the demand of cross cultural assessment test is increasing due to the increasing factor of globalization to gain competitive advantage in international market. According to Mendenhall and Oddou, 1985 one of the important option for evaluating the selection process is the use of psychological tests and evaluation devices. There are number of instruments available to measure the stress level of an individual. In 2.1 the real importance of psychometric test is shown. Psychometric tests are reliable that the selected person will be the one on whom one can rely. And obviously these kinds of tests are valid for any kind of job. The most important point in this test is that it does not include any biasness and the selectors cannot show the biasness while selecting on the basis of psychometric tests. These tests are also standard for different jobs. All the above mentioned qualities and factors involve in the psychometric tests. In other words one can say that almost all the abilities present in an individuals mind can be noticed, and the end result will always ends up in the right selection of expatriate. 2.5.2 Assessment Centre: As the assessment centers are considered to be one of the best selection techniques so according to Sparow and Brewster assessment centers will be the best idea as a selection technique to assess the competency of international managers. This is rarely the case, however. According to sparrow (1999) Even where assessment centers are used to select the managers in international settings, the key cross cultural assessment centers seems to be to design the assessment process so that it is very adaptable to local environment in which it will be operated. So there is need of cross culture assessment centers in which international managers can be assessed accordingly with the changing environment. Krause and Gebert (2003) have done study on international literature on the conception, operation and evaluation of assessment centers. He examined 281 German firms whose language was German and he compares them with the previously studied firms of United States of America. Study showed that both the American and German firms use the assessment centers but the purpose of some of them was different from the basics. For example the competencies assessed for job analysis might be identified through the use of interviews with job incumbents in 79% of US firms and only 39% of German firms. Most of the German firms rely on interviews for the selection of international managers or expatriates. So the assessment centers are considered to be an important process for expatriate selection. 2.5.3 Coffee Machine System This system was the idea of Harris and Brewster (1999) the key findings of the study show the reality of the selection process for expatriate selection in the organizations. In many organizations the selection process falls under what we call ‘coffee machine system and this system is the most common form of expatriate selection. What happens is that the senior line manager is standing by the coffee machine when he/she is joined by the colleague: ‘Hows it going? ‘Oh, you know, overworked and underpaid. Actually Jimmy in Mumbai has just fallen ill and is being flown home. I dont know who I can choose to work over there at very short notice of time. It is driving me crazy. ‘Have you met Simon on the fifth floor? he is working in the same line of work. He is very good and bright and looks like going a long way. He was telling me that he and his wife had great holiday in Goa a couple of years ago. He seems to like India. Could be worthy to speak to him. Hey, thanks I will check and speak to him. ‘No problem. They dont seem to be able to improve this coffee though, do they? What happen in the organization next is that the manger will take some decision and will have informal discussion with his seniors about Simon and then that man will be called and interviewed and selected for the required position. Accordingly HR department and financial department will be involved in the process and the formal and systematic process will be started. This method is rarely used in the organizations in particular cases when there is an urgent need to fill the position of expatriate. 2.6 Niche Assessments According to Bolt (2008) many assessment venders specialize in certain niches and offer off-the-shelf products to meet clients testing needs. However, vendors can find such persons or individuals for the company who can fit in the organizations new environment and can coop with the new organizations culture. Testing is the most important part of the application process of the candidate because testing gives the good idea of the individuals abilities and competencies. 2.7 Factors involved in selection Process: There are number of factors which affect the performance of expatriate. Dowling, Welch, Schuler, (1999) recognised some of the important and most affective factors and these are the factors which involved to determine an appropriate expatriate selection process. All the factors are shown in a model below. 2.7.1 Technical Ability: According to Hays, 1971 All expatriates are assigned abroad to complete some task weather its building a dam, running some business, or teaching it all depends on the personal technical ability to perform that task. Obviously it is important to consider the individuals personal ability to perform the required task assigned to the expatriate. So in selection it is another important area which needs to look at. Different research findings show that the multinational organization give a lot of importance to the technical abilities of the individuals going abroad for international assignments at the time of their selection. According to Harvey and Novicevic, (2001) technical and functional expertise has been the primary criterion for selecting expatriate managers for assignments. Hixon found that the selection was based on technical ability and willingness to reside abroad. If the individual is selected without keeping in view its technical ability. It can create the big problems for the multinational organizations to complete its related task or assignment. Reinforcing the emphasis on technical skills is the relative ease with which the multinational may assess the potential candidates potential, since technical and managerial competence can be determined on the basis of past performance of the individual who is going to be selected as expatriate. In fact domestic selection cannot be equal to the international selection but person can be selected on the basis of past domestic records which he has performed domestically as the basic criteria is always the same in all the multinational organizations so on the basis of past abilities there should not be any problem for the organizations to select the expatriates. This approach is also found by Foster and Johnsen, (1996) who report the results of the research into the expatriate selection practices for the newly internationalized UK organizations which shows that organizations keep in view the technical skills, and pr evious domestic records while selecting expatriate for international assignments. 2.7.2Cross Cultural Suitability: The environment and the culture where an expatriate is going is an important factor for an expatriate. So the selectors of the expatriates should always consider the factor of culture for the expatriate. Although these factors does not guarantee for an expatriate for his successes but if these factors are not considered it can lead it towards the failure of expatriate. If the culture is considered then it is always important to study the Hofsteds dimensions for cross culture and Trompenaars dimensions so these researches are explained in detail as follows. 2.7.3 Culture: Culture is always important for any expatriate selection, so it is very necessary for HR managers and selectors to keep the factor of culture in view while selecting expatriate for international assignments. There have been a lot of studies on culture and there are a lot of different definitions of culture some of them are given below. (Kluckholn Strodtbeck 1952) define culture as, â€Å"a set of basic assumptions-shared solutions to universal problems of external adaptation (and internal integration- which have evolved over time and are handed down from one generation to the next. The life style of people living in the society is called culture it includes the social, economical, political, religious, life style of the individuals in the country. According to Drennan, 1992 â€Å"whatever is going around is called culture.† Culture is the way of life of a group of people. There are obvious differences between the different cultures such as language, dress, religion, beliefs, and behaviours of the people, and there are also implicit differences between the two cultures such as in values, assumptions about how things should be. So these different degrees of explicitness are often called the culture. ScullionLinehan, (2005) So the culture is very important factor for the selection of expatriate because the individuals move from one culture to another culture for the completion of their assignment. 2.7.4 Hofstedes Cultural Dimensions Greet Hofstedes cultures consequences (1980, 2001) explores the differences in thinking and social action at the country level between members of 50 nations and three regions. Hofstede originally used IBM employees answers to company attitude survey conducted twice, around 1968 and 1972. The survey generated more than 116,000 questionnaires with the number of respondents used in the analysis being approximately 30,000 in 1969 and 41000 in 1973. Hofstede identified and validated four cultural dimensions from respondents patterned answers. For each dimension, he presented possible origins as well as predictors and consequences for management behavior. Hofsteds four dimensions are as follows 1. Power Distance 2. Uncertainty Avoidance 3. Individualism versus Collectivism 4. Masculinity versus Femininity Another dimension which is fifth dimension presented by Michael Bond is Long term versus Short term Orientation was subsequently developed from a research to accommodate non-western orientations and has been adopted from the Chinese Culture Connection study. Power distance: The dimension indicates the extent up to which extend a society expects and a high degree of inequality in institutions and organizations. It refers to the relationship between supervisors and subordinates. It reflects the extent to which the less powerful members of organisations expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. In organisations illustration of a high power distance score is generally represented as a highly vertical hierarchical pyramid. Subordinates are often told or ordered about a particular task but they are not normally entitled to discuss the decision made by the top management so basically the meaning of power distance is that higher the person in hierarchy the more difficult will be this person to approach. So there are some barriers for that person to see their top management. The barriers can be of different ways like the person barriers or the employee is not allowed to see the top manager or they are not allowed to attend the high m anagerial level meetings in which decisions are made. So basically power distance shows the distance between a supervisor and his employee. Uncertainty avoidance: This refers to the degree to which a society prefers predictability, security and stability. According to Hofsted the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by uncertain or unknown situations. He argued that high uncertainty avoidance is expressed for example by a companys need for regulations which tends to minimize in the behaviour of its employees. Company rules are such thing which cannot be broken by the employees even if he think that breaking the rule is in companys best interest in such sort of environment the work stress is more and uncertainty avoidance is high. On the other hands if the employees are less affected by uncertainty is called low uncertainty avoidance. Individualism-Collectivism: this dimension relates to the extent to which people prefer to take care of themselves and their immediate families rather than being bound to some wider collectively such as extended family. Hofsted ask the IBM individuals that how important is to keep in view his work goals rather than the organisation. If there is preferred work goals stress dependence on organisation. For example good physical working condition, good ventilation enough space individualism in the work place can be seen. Collectivism can be seen in preference of collective organisation. Masculinity-Femininity: Masculine societies value assertiveness, competitiveness and materialism as opposed to the feminine values of relationships and the quality of life. Males tend to express preferences for assertiveness recognition when doing good job. On the other hand females prefer the aspect of interpersonal work. Michele Bonds Research about cultural dimensions: Another dimension which is mentioned above is Long-term versus Short -term Orientation. In 1987 a questionnaire was developed by Michele bond with the project Chinese Culture Connection (CCC). He developed a questionnaire representing fundamental and basic values of Chinese people. This questionnaire was then given to the students of 23 Asian and non Asian countries. The statistical analysis developed four different dimensions. Three out of four were same as it was of Hofsteds the fifth was different from Hofsted. 2.7.5 Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner Like Hofsted Trompenaar also studied different dimensions of cultures. According to him different culture deals with different universal problems. He proposed three problems which are as follows 1. Social Interaction 2. Passage of time 3. Relationship to the Environment These cultural dimensions describe the characteristics that each culture provides an answer to three fundamental problems. In multinational and international organizations cultural dimensions will be based on the the responses of the managers. The dimensions found by the Tropenaar and Hampden is discussed in detail as below. 2.7.6 Trompennars Cultural Dimensions The Trompenaars cultural dimensions are discussed as follows. Neutral versus Affective: This dimension is particularly based on the certain situation. Trompenaar measured this dimension with the particular question which was how would you behave if you face any problem at work and you feel upset about it? Would you express your feelings openly before other peoples? The answers and responses were different from different countries. The resulting cultural dimension tells us that in particular countries emotion is being displayed together with rationale arguments. This may be confusing for the people coming from the culture where rational argument is provided instead of emotions so that dimension was recognized by Tropmpanaar Individualism versus Communitarianism: this dimension of trompanaar resembles to the dimension of Hofsted which is on employees. This dimension mainly focuses on employees goals within an organization the way they work within an organization and their responsibilities. Universalism versus Practiclarism: This dimension is about the personal behavior and its implement on universal rules for example not telling lie and following the rules and regulations. People can either consider that principles apply whatever the situation, or specificity of each situation determines whether one should apply them or not. Achievement versus Ascription: This dimension is tells us about the personal achievement of the employees within an organization. In the work environment which is achievement versus ascription the employees judge themselves at their own and make decisions. They are also motivated to work more good and to work more hard within the organization. Specify versus Diffuseness: this type of dimension tells us that in most of the cultures the people compartmentalize themselves and divide their work in different phases. Being good friend at work does never means that they should know each other family and of course for good relatives its not necessary to know their work environment. For example a manager will never meet its subordinate while playing golf, he will instead meet some golf coach or golf specialist to improve his game. So that is kind of culture which describe such kind of dimension. Sequential versus Synchronic the time is divided in to two main themes to perform in certain time frame and orientation. Hall, 1959 introduced monochromic and polychromic. Monochrony is a perception that time is linear sequential and definite whereas Polychrony is a perception that time is multilinear. So these two types of times differ for two different cultures. Trompenaars, 1993 develops these themes regarding their implication for action made sequentially or synchronically in an organization. Inner versus Outer Directedness: This dimension reflects the belief either that individuals can control and influence their environment or that they limited ability to do so. Consequences for management are reflected for example in strategic plan either they will tend to plan and provoke changes or try to take best advantage of the available situation. 2.7.7 Family Requirements: Family factors composed of five criteria: marital status, children, spouses attitude, spouses employment and spouse adjustment (Chen, TzengTang, 2005). It is always important for the HR department of MNE to consider the personal life of an expatriate. So the contribution of the family particularly spouse plays an important role for the success of an expatriate for the completion of international assignment. Black and Stephens examined the influence of the spouse on American expatriate adjustment. They surveyed 220 U.S expatriates and their spouses working in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, they found that the adjustment of the expatriate working abroad for international assignment is positively related to the spouses adjustment. The adjustment of the spouse is highly correlated with the adjustment of the expatriate. Likewise there was an Australian research into the psychological impact of relocation on the partners of 58 expatriate managers. They found that the decisions which were ma de by most of the expatriates to relocate highly depend on the decision of his partner. The above two mentioned researches show that the family of the expatriate highly depends upon the settlement of expatriate abroad. 2.7.8 Country/Cultural Requirements: The host country may be an important determinant. Some regions and countries are hard to adjust like the remote areas away from the cities, or the war zone countries and now days there are some countries which are not safe as far as terrorism is concerned. Accompanying the family members will again be a big responsibility for the multinational organizations. In most of the countries where it is very hard for the Europeans to go for example the country like Saudi Arabia has got the culture according to which women have to cover their heads and cover them properly so it will be a bit hard for the family of western expatriate to adjust in that culture. Or this can be vice versa as well. Weather is another important factor for the countries and it is a bit hard for the expatriates to adjust themselves in the different weather from their host country. Black and Mandenhall (1990) argued about the cross cultural adjustment cross cultural adjustment that it can be facilitated if the expatria tes have awareness of the norms and behaviors of the host country. 2.7.9 MNE Requirements: Multinational may consider the proportion of expatriates to local staff when making selection decisions mainly as an outcome of its staffing philosophy. However the requirements of the different MNEs is different or they may be require to use PCNs and TCNs, obviously this will react to the selection decision for the multinational organisations. Other situational factors are as follows The mode of operation involved: Selecting staff to work in an international joint venture may involve major input from the local partner, and be constrained by the negotiated agreement on selection processes. Duration of assignment: Family members tend to accompany an expatriate when the assignment is only for three to six months duration, so family requirements may not be a strong factor in the selection decision. International training development In above 2.3 the whole process of expatriation is shown it starts from the recruitment and selection, once the right person is chosen for the right job then the most important step of training starts which is directly related to the pre departure step for expatriation then the process of development of the process starts which ends up in making of an international team when an expatriate is fully trained then they are told about the nature of assignment. 2.7.10 Language: Language is another important aspect when adjusting away from home country. This ability is often linked with the cross cultural ability. For an expatriate it is necessary to learn a bit of language of the country where he is going to accomplish its assignment. According to Tung knowledge of host countrys language is important for functional head and operative jobs. According to victor (1992) difference in languages is the major barrier for the international assignments. But according o some studies and researches in the past the language sometimes is not very much important for expatriates completing their international assignments. In terms of other selection criteria the factor of language is placed lower down when looking into the factors for the expatriate selection process. As done by the price water house research 1998 they placed language at third place while determining the factors for the expatriate selection. Basically language is not any problem for the selection of expat riate where the host country speaks the same language so the problem occurs when the expatriate has to be select for the non English speaking language. But now a day the English has now become an international language and it is necessary for an international manger to learn the English language to communicate even in the non English speaking countries. 2.8 Strategic choices in expatriate selection: As we have seen above the factors which need to be kept under consideration while selecting expatriates for international assignment. The process of selection is basically used to fill the international positions of the organisation. The organisation faces several strategic choices during selection process. The strategic choices are mentioned as follows. * Internal recruitment versus external recruitment. * Individuals versus teams. * Technical qualifications versus other selection criteria. * Extrinsic rewards versus intrinsic rewards. The above mentioned strategic represent two opposite extremes on a continuum. The majority of the decisions fall in between the two extreme strategies. 2.8.1 Internal versus external recruitment Interesting findings by the recent study on expatriate selection is that there is shortage of international managers, due to growing concern of international mobility (Scullion, 1994). The shortage of international managers creates problems in expatriate selection. From an organisations point of view the selection decision is made under circumstances where the organisation has a lot of applications looking for the job of international managers. Brewster and Scullion 1997 suggested that availability of the international managers seems to be the critical variable in acceptance of international assignment The above discussion tells us that it is not always necessary that the required managers or expatriates are always available within the organisation to overcome this shortage of the managers the organisation then find some external sources to fill up the position. According to the study by Torbion 1982 and Scullion 1994 most of the organisations mostly rely on the internal sources of the organisation to fill up this position. On the other hand Boyacigiller 1990 suggested that the external market is always full of required talented managers who can work as an international manager. Here comes a very interesting question that why the most of the researcher emphasis mostly on internal selection of the international managers? The answer which click in mind is that internal selection makes the task easy for the selectors and HR managers while selecting the expatriates because as a member of organisation most of the selectors know their performance and abilities of the individuals working within an organisation. So this can give them benefit to select the expatriate with the required abilities. The internal selection of international managers becomes reliable when strategic purpose of the assignment is co-ordination and control of operations. This point was discussed by Black, et al 1992 by saying that for the good co-ordination for an expatriate in global market requires assignments of the people with broad experience in the firm including a lot of contacts within the firm. 2.8.2 Case study Barclaycard International (centralized control and recruitment primarily for overseas labour markets.) â€Å"Barclays introduced its first credit card in the United Kingdom named as Barclaycard and now Barclays has one of the major global credit card businesses which have speedy growth approach. Outside the UK, it operates in the United States, Germany, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Norway Portugal, Ireland, France, Asia Pacific, and across Africa. Barclays is currently looking to have alliances with Standard Bank of South Africa, acquisition of Juniper Financial Corporation and a series of in-country launches. Barclays employed 3000 staff, and it had 15 per cent based in the UK. To enable development, Barclaycard International recruited a group of people management process to bring firmness, management and good organization of people. Challenges were different in the different cultures depending upon the country, culture and business market of the country. The basic and first age

Humour and Satire in Urdu Literature

Humor and Satire In Urdu Literature Taken Gull* & Tableaus Abstract Humor & Satire are an integral part of all forms of literature; & when the tragic part of a drama/story becomes unbearable, humor/satire provide a much needed diversion & relief. This article examines the effect of humor & satire with reference to some of the leading men of letters of Urdu literature. Keywords: Humor, Satire, Urdu, Literature It is difficult for human beings to always lead a solemn and glum life. They require amusement, mental relaxation and recreation of some sort. Humor is the most suitable & Innocent option for this purpose.Humor can be verbal, visual or physical. Non-verbal forms of communication for example – music and art can also be humorous. Since literature is the replica of life it produces not only serious, subtle and delicate literary pieces but also the need for mild, mature and mellow compositions has always been longed for to coax and cajole the readers. To maintain the regulari ty and steadiness of life the elements of humor and satire are always needed. Prevalently humor and satire are used as a compound genre but they are two different words having two distinct meanings.Simon Waistlines is of the opinion hat humor is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile. In fact, humor succeeds where wisdom fails. Stephen Lacked asserts: â€Å"Humor may also be defined as the kindly contemplation of the Incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know, because I wrote it myself. † 1 This classification demonstrates three important aspects, which are the ‘Irregularities of life', ‘kindly contemplation' and ‘artistic expression'.The first point explains that a humorist does not look at the Irregularities Taken Gull, Assistant Professor, Zinnia College for Women, University of Appeaser. ** Tableaus laved, Lecturer, Zinnia College for Women, university of Appeaser. * Taken Gull & Tableaus Saved of life disdainfully rather gets amused with them, the second Is that he deals up with comic situations and gruesomeness of life and the third point explains that a humorist adopts a very skillful manner of portraying such funny situations instead of presenting them in a blunt and boring way.Moving on to the better half of humor that Is satire, sarcasm and gibe as defined by the encyclopedia Britannica; â€Å"Satire In Its literary aspect, may be defined as the expression In adequate terms of the sense of amusement or disgust excited by the ridiculous or unseemly, provided that literary form without humor, satire is invective; without literary form, it is mere clownish Jeering†2 Babul- al-Jeez Hafted Suicide defines satire in the following words: â€Å"The comic situations of life which can be pointed out and the contemptuous aspects of life which can be opposed and humorously criticized are termed as satire†. The process of sarcasm shares a lot w ith surgery. As a surgeon dissects and opens p the human body in order to extricate it by the infected portion, similarly a satirist identifies the follies of the society and extricates it of the corruptive matters. Although it is true and admitted that a satirist definitely has the gusto and ardor of elatedness and supremacy present in him. Whatever a satirist targets he shows his soreness towards it and is desirous to modify and aspire it. Perhaps the element of sympathy is absent which is considered to be the spirit of humor.ABA-AH-Chair considering, states: â€Å"Those satirists who extract amusement and laugh at the helplessness of people can never reach the heights. A good satirist is a merciless surgeon and ruthlessly dissects but in his satire there are no signs of personal revenge or hollowness. His sole purpose is constructive and to bring forward a positive change. The objective of his art is to point out the hideousness of life and to beautify society. â€Å"4 Whether it is satire or humor both require sincerity and fidelity, whereas, prejudice, priggishness and ego are all considered injurious for them.Making somebody a subject of humor or saturating someone on the basis of personal grudges is a complete violation of the rules and is The Dialogue 179 Volume VII Number 2 Humor and Satire in Urdu Literature extremely cheap in itself. That is the reason, why in every literature it is considered to be the humor and satire of the lowest degree. Contrary to this, the earnest pleasure or displeasure of mind and thought gives vitality to humor and satire. Then the most difficult aspect of this skill is to criticize your own self.To ridicule others and make them the target of buffoonery is comparatively easy but to mock at oneself jovially is most difficult thing in the world. It is therefore rightly said by Shabby-LU- Hosannas that only those nations are considered to be civilized who can make fun of their weaknesses. 5 Satire can only grow and develop in such societies where people have prudent and practical approach towards life. Only those people give space to satire who have the patience and will for change.Rehashed Mad Suicide says that humor and satire can only develop in those countries and nations who are independent and value independence. But this genre cannot build up among the nations who are bound in the shackles of slavery. Among the people where gods and decent and quality humor and satire. Sarcasm exposes before the readers the personal folly and humiliation of others which can only be handled by a mature mind of decent taste and disciplined attitude. In short, it is a genre whose reader is not only able to see the faults of others but their own misdeeds as well.The element of humor makes this genre light hearted, Jovial, intimate and infectious. It is therefore necessary that it should not be cheap and vulgar but should rather be meaningful, far reaching, universalism and enduring. In another situation humor and s atire can be made the basis for estimating standards of the literature of any language. Humor and fun are cultural and represent the customs, traditions, beliefs and norms of a particular society. In fact, the types of humor vary from people to people and society to society.The comic gestures and funny situations which can be a laughing stalk for us may not be humorous at all for a British or an American. On the other hand, according to Muhammad Alma Khan humor and satire together can create the history of the mentality of a nation and also are its heritage. Also it can be agreed upon that humor and irony of any community or civilization can be used as n absolute scale to test the glee, perception, temperaments and feelings of them. 7 Now we have to observe whether humor and satire are correlated or not.Norman Forlorn in this connection states that for literary satire two components are worthwhile; one is criticizing and saturating an odious incident or thing and the other humor. 18 0 Rasher Mad Quietude's opinion is contrary to that of Norman Furlong's. According to him satire is implicit in humor, whereas, humor should not be a part of satire. He considers humor superior to satire and a form of arts which is difficult in execution. For humor, he says: complacent attitude and conferment is required, whereas, for satire energy, sorrow, anger and assertion all are required simultaneously. In comparison to Rehashed Mad Suicide, Stayed Thatches Hussein's notion is comparatively more steady where he writes that the sour feeling that people develop while reading a satirical work is the very reason why people separate it from humor. Hence, Thicker and Meredith both have accepted the vitality of humor but not of satire. The reality is that the existence of satire is impossible without the presence of humor, whereas, humor can exist without attire. 9 Anyhow, it is important to observe the several techniques of humor and satire. ). The first technique is that of compari son in which humor is created by the simultaneously. The second technique is â€Å"the use of language†. Developing humor by creatively using the human speech and expression in which Taker (repetition), Rarity-e-leaflet (pun) and Bazaar Kanji (wit) are included . Iii). The third technique is that of a humorous situation. Iv). The fourth technique is the use of a humorous character. V). The fifth technique is that of parody. V'). The sixth technique s that of irony.No doubt there are other techniques like Sol-e-mammal (paradox), Ambulance (exaggeration) etc. But the ones given above are universally known and popular. After observing the general aspects of humor and satire, we switch on to the art of humor and satire in Urdu literature. When we throw a cursory glance at it we learn that the early onset of it can be found in some ancient Distant (legends). But the quality of humor and satire in some places is quite inferior while at others the jazzy effects of naturally pleasant and amusing humor and satire are visible. InUrdu literature humor and satire are conspicuously observed for the first time in the letters written by Kigali where frank humor and offhandedness are quite domineering. Kigali was blessed with dual attribute of being a poet and a prose writer. Humor was a part of his nature, that's why Hall called him â€Å"Hewn-e- Career† (humorous animal). His humor is pious and pure. He smiles at the occasions when people are whining and crying. He is capable of laughing at himself not only on others. In his 181 letters we find soft smiles instead of whole hearted laughter.In his letters, instead of sing loud and sharp colors, he uses a beautiful blend of light colors of humor. Besides Kigali, humor and wit are also observed in the writings of Sir Seed Mad Khan and Chablis Neumann, whereas, the elements of satire are more specific in the literature contributed by Deputy Nazi Mad. Sir Seed's work was serious, constructive and persuasive but in reaction the humor and satire of demeanor was introduced in the form of Owed-e-punch, which swathed the irregularities, serration and Jaggedness of the society.But the quality of humor and satire of this newspaper was below standard. Jaded Hussein, Mach Bag Steamfitter, Tarragon Nathan Hajji and Jaywalk Parsed Barb etc. Are the eminent figures of this age. After this, there were seen several different kinds of humor and satire in Urdu literature and it gained a lot of popularity, some were self evident while others were mellow and mild. The names of Mullah Ramirez, Rehashed Mad Squid, Pratfall Bag, Eczema Bag Caught, Patria Babushka, Shattuck Than and Flak BEMA, etc. Re worth seriousness and humor. His purpose is always serious but style of expression is pleasant and witty. His choice of diction is the main reason of his successful writings ND he is an expert of using idiomatic and flowery language of Delhi. He loves antiquity and traditional people and is considered a conservative person. His style is productive and he talks about the improvement of society but never becomes dry and stringy. Weaker Gaga says that liveliness and vivacity are the main features of his style.In his writings certain happenings, characters and comparison are not used as tools to create laughter but words and sentences are constructed in such a pleasant way that they pleasantly touch the sensations of mind and heart. Such expressions automatically create smiles and one feels fresh and lively. 0 Although Patria Babushka has less contribution (in volume) but whatever he wrote gives him a prominent place in Urdu literature. His study is very vast and he has a great appreciation & understanding of international and especially English literature.There is a touch of delicacy, liveliness and good taste in his humor. He creates humor with situations more than words. He is good at parody writing but repartee is his special technique. He does not laugh at the individuals but at the groups and classes. Stayed Abdullah writes about him that the essence of his humor is based on integrity, uprightness ND sincerity more than sympathy and kindness. He dislikes and hates absurdities. He is a misanthropist and sometimes mocks himself. 11 182 Rehashed Mad Quietude's name is also mentioned along with Patria Babushka.Rehashed Mad was an alumni of Alight and taught there as a professor of Urdu literature. His essays are not easily comprehensible and intelligible because he keeps on referring to specific incidents and only those people can enjoy his writings who have deep knowledge in history, politics and literature. He quickly mentions one thing and the mind keeps on collecting segments into a single whole. The delicacy and fore-sightedness of his thoughts is quite different from other humorists. Ale- Mad Sartor writes about him that Rehashed Mad Squid is different from Patria and Particular Bag.He is among those people who are neither considered conservative nor modern rather he belongs to both the categories. He is an expert in paradox as well as repartee. Because of this dual quality he is considered Chesterton and Bernard Shah of Urdu literature. 12 Ale Mad Sartor gives a very good comparison of these three humor and satire writers, â€Å"Patria takes the raw material or his humor from the living beings where as Particular Bag from the dead ones writers were those who were not basically humorists but their writings reflect the sweetness of humor and satire.Some salient names of such writers are Mimed-LU- Fade, Balalaika Sad, Muffed All Badland, Manual Safari All Khan, Jazz Abdul Gaffer, Goshawk Hosannas Minimize, Abdul Amazed Salk, Amazed Lahore, Abraham Sales and Abdul Myocardial etc. The eminent names among modern humor writers are: Colonel Muhammad Khan, Shaffer-our-Raman, Gymkhana Ala Kapok, Fine Nash, Moisakos Hussein Had, Tall Hag Assam, Seaside Salk, Wausau Nazism, Goshawk Abdul Chaffer, Magmata Hussein, Young Butt and Muskrat Mad Housefly. The m ost prominent name among them is Muskrat Mad Housefly who is a natural humorist.His writings are adorned and decorated with special formalities but his sentences are smooth, pleasant and abrupt. He is witty and derives meanings out of meanings and deduces deep hidden meanings from apparent descriptions which seem to be an extempore conversation of a scholar. Most of his topics are taken from our day- today life but even from these common topics he seeks out some strange and amazing aspects of humor. Shade Mashes says that the foresight of Housefly entreats into human psyche and makes observations†¦

Bbva case study analysis Essay

1. Introduction It has been claimed that BBVA has implemented an open innovation, â€Å"a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology† says Chesbrough (2003)1. BBVA is seeing itself positioned right and succeeded for innovations. It is suspected that whether the innovation at BBVA is successful and highly recognized open innovation approach. This essay will examine how BBVA build their capabilities to embed an open innovation approach in their organisation and outline some challenges when BBVA moving forward to more open innovation in the near future. 1.1 BBVA’s Key Characteristics BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) is a multinational Spanish banking group, providing a wide range of financial services for both businesses and consumers. BBVA is ranked as the second largest bank in Spain. As it’s headquartered in Madrid, BBVA mainly resides on Latin American countries. It also has a strong presence in southern Europe, and has expanded into the United States and some countries in Asia. In 2012, BBVA employed more than 115,000 people and served over 53 million customers in 32 countries with around 8,000 branches2. BBVA implements customercentric approach as its core business and positioning of the BBVA brand3. Not only BBVA focus on a strong customer orientation but also a dedicated innovation. 2. Innovation at BBVA 2.1 Core activities and principles Over the last decade, BBVA has inclined more customer-centric and gave a lot of attention to innovation. In 2007, the BBVA innovation centre was established in Madrid, where many different innovative projects were born and passed through an experiment procedure, beginning from prototype phrase to testing process. Following this, the 1 Chesbrough, H. 2003. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. 2 BBVA Group Highlights [online], BBVA, Available from: < http://shareholdersandinvestors.bbva.com/TLBB/micros/bbva2012/en/Highlights/BBVAGroupHighlights.html> [2 October 2013] 3  BBVA Annual Report 2012 [online], BBVA, Available from: [2 October 2013] 2 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management outcomes are analyzed and valued before launching the innovation projects, which are formed under BBVA’s innovation and customer orientation approaches. It has been claimed that the following three main principles are extremely helpful to BBVA in the successful development of new services. (Ramis-Pujol and Drà ¶ege, 2011)4 1) Continuous customer orientation and expertise †¢ Start with the analysis of the customers (customer insight) 2) Proactive outward-looking †¢ Look for and welcome the ideas from the outside to the company †¢ Start-up fairs and sponsor ideas competition 3) Teamwork and concurrent feedback loops for fast decisions on innovation project progress †¢ Good communication within team †¢ Each innovation project is reviewed and questioned weekly However, it is doubted that with these underlying principles how BBVA ensure that their lead from innovation is maintained. 2.2 Innovative Projects According to BBVA innovation center, there are a number of continuous successions of innovations offering to their customers’ needs. Most of BBVA innovative projects were idea-led and technology-enabled. When BBVA considered its projects, it is apparent that those projects were driven from the unmet needs or customers’ needs that are not available on the market, which Von Hippel E. defined as â€Å"user-driven innovation†5 As Ramis-Pujol and  Drà ¶ege (2011) studied innovation at BBVA, they found that BBVA developed a large number of new banking services within only two years. They also examined some projects relevant to innovation practice (see table 1) that described how BBVA identified the market and developed these projects before launching to the market. After implementing, some projects were highly successful but some were not. Despite a lack of achievement in some projects, BBVA is still able to exploit the experience made within the projects and to share valuable knowledge to other innovative projects. 4 Ramis-Pujol J. and Drà ¶ege H., 2011. Case study of Innovation at BBVA. ESADE University. Von Hippel E. (20 August 2013), User-driven innovation [online], BBVA Innovation Center, Available from: [1 October 2013] 5 3 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management Table 1: Some of the innovative projects in BBVA6 Projects Type of Project tu ceuntas Online personal finance management service Partner Strands.com (24% acquisition) TV casting show Small IT firm Partner operate separately Searching and networking web for SMEs Swendish design company N/A POK tpresento econta Accounting service for SMEs Virtual Doc ATM Stored Document Online Study on customers’ use of technology ATM software and hardware developments econta & external expert (70% acquisition) Virtual Doc (70% acquisition) IDEO (Signed contract) ATM Manufacture Involvement Joint project team Actively involved Partner operate separately Internal expert get involved Instead of doing all processed itself, BBVA seeks partners or external experts such as the technologists outside of BBVA, who had experienced in this area, to help it embed the technology around its innovative ideas that BBVA wants to deliver to the markets. Although it has the partnering companies in their innovation, it has been argued that some of the BBVA innovative projects may seem to be outsourcing than open innovation. According to Belcourt M. (2006)7, â€Å"outsourcing refers to a contractual relationship for the provision of business services by an external provider†. The followings are the example for this argument: 1) â€Å"POK† – once BBVA had the idea to introduce TV casting show in order to get closer to younger target groups, BBVA hired a small IT firm to independently develop the social media technology and marketing for â€Å"POK† project. 2) ATM – the service was built in partnership with IDEO, the best-known product and service Design Company, by signed the contract. IDEO provided the detailed study of customer’s needs and observation of how people behaved at ATMs. 3) Tpresento, the yellow pages website for SMEs, BBVA selected the Swedish design company to provide a website design for this project.8. 6 Summarized from Ramis-Pujol J. and Drà ¶ege H., 2011. Case study of Innovation at BBVA. ESADE University. p.7-16. Belcourt M., 2006. Outsourcing – The Benefits and the Risks. Journal of Human Resource Management Review, 16(2), 269-279. 8 Ramis-Pujol J. and Drà ¶ege H., 2011. Case study of Innovation at BBVA. ESADE University. 7 4 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management According that the small IT firm, IDEO and Swedish Design Company were paid to work for BBVA, it was probably evaluated that BBVA externalized those companies and these BBVA’s innovative projects look more like outsourcing than open innovation. Moreover, regarding a service differentiation that â€Å"provides prioritized service qualities to multiple classes of client requests† says Zhu H. et al., 2001)9, it can be seen that BBVA tried to differentiate their services related to innovation to serve their multiple customers (innovation shoppers). Although BBVA tried to make them look very different, the service itself is exactly the same. The example for this is the ATMs, BBVA differentiates the ways customer access to the bank but still provides core banking service to the customers. 2.3 Open innovation at BBVA BBVA has embedded an open innovation as described above in their organization. They were aware that good ideas and expertise did not always reside inside the organization but the collaboration side by side with internal and external expertise. Chesbrough H. et al. (2006)10 founded that this practices â€Å"will extend to suppliers, customers, partners, third parties, and general community as a whole.† It is considered important that open innovation would relate to a degree of engagement between internal knowledge and external partners. Chesbrough (2012)11 points out that there are two important kinds of an open innovation. The first one is â€Å"outside-in† open innovation, opening up the process of company’s innovation to many external inputs and contributions. In case of BBVA, it seeks out potential partners, who already had experience have experienced in new technologies, and then form a productive relationship with them. The example for this is Tu cuentas project, a unique service concept providing online money management. BBVA invested 24% acquisition in Strands.com (the innovative IT Company), relying on this company in order to develop and maintain an application of the personal finance analyzer. 9 Zhu H. et al., 2001. Demand-driven service differentiation in cluster-based network servers. In: INFOCOM 2001, ed. 20th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Anchorage 22-26 April 2001. IEEE, 679 – 688, vol.2. 10 Chesbrough H et al. 2006. Open Innovation, Researching a New Paradigm. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1-12. 11 Chesbrough, H. 2012. Open Innovation. Research-Technology Management, July-August 2012, 20-27. 5 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management The second kind of an open innovation is â€Å"inside-out†, which organisations are required to allow the unused ideas to flow outside the organisations for others to apply in their businesses. Chesbrough (2012) discovered while doing his research that Xerox traded their misfit or unsuccessful projects into the market. It also found that those â€Å"false negative† projects that did not provide benefit to the Xerox’s core business model might have essentially more value if they could be commercialized through a different business model. Unlike Xerox, BBVA actively absorb external technology but they do not transfer unused projects to external partners. The example of the organization that applied both outside-in and inside-out open innovation is Procter & Gamble, not only they embrace outside-in open innovation via its Connect+Develop approach12(the practice of tapping external intellectual property development to accelerate internal innovation) but also share their internal asset development and know-how to help others outside the company. On the other hand, the antithesis of the open innovation is a close innovation, which â€Å"internal innovation activities lead to internally developed products and services that are then distributed by the firm.† (Chesbrough 2006, p.20). Some researchers (Lichtenthaler U, et al., 2011)13 mention about employee attitudes that a close innovation is characterized by high level of employee attitudes that would not like to acquire technology from external sources, and instead would like to emphasize on internal development of new technological knowledge. They also would not like to transfer company’s technologies. The company that embedded with those attitudes would not pay particular attention to open innovation initiatives. Therefore, the negative attitude of acquiring external knowledge might impede the open innovation approach. In order to weight which approaches between the open and the close innovation applied to BBVA, how BBVA implemented implementation whether pure open or close innovation is needed to be considered thoroughly as follows. Regarding the BBVA’s innovative projects, it does not exactly acquire new technological knowledge from the 12 P&G Open Innovation (2013) What is Connect+Develop? [online], P&G, Available from: < http://www.pgconnectdevelop.com/home/pg_open_innovation.html> [7 October 2013] 13 Lichtenthealer U. et al., 2011. Is your company ready for open innovation?. Journal of MIT Sloan Management Review, 53 (1), 4548. 6 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management outsiders or the outsiders only partly transferred the knowledge to them. BBVA builds relationship with external partners in order to strengthen and speed up their internal innovation process but they do not really gain the new knowledge and know-how from them. In some projects such as POK and tpresento, BBVA just paid money and assigned their partners to work for them. This leads to a low level of engagement between BBVA and partnering companies. In addition, there is a small evidence of the customer engagement in the innovation process be seen as another indication of the open innovation. As mentioned earlier, BBVA intends to move forward to the open innovation and it has embedded the environment of the open innovation through their organization. It is likely that what BBVA has being done go beyond the close innovation. Therefore, it can be concluded that the innovation at BBVA has been a â€Å"slightly open innovation† approach but how could BBVA think about a system that was more open is still questionable. 3. Challenges in moving towards to an open innovation Uncertainty in the future might lead to a number of managerial challenges. The followings are some potential dangers that BBVA might be aware of when keep moving towards to more open innovation approach. 3.1 Potential Dangers in the future Centralising innovation According to the innovation centre in Madrid, the customer insight department and all innovation projects are centrally manage within this centre. Although the centralisation brings BBVA the effectiveness of authority control and uniformity in action, BBVA should be aware of localised control of customer service and customer satisfaction. Successful launching new services in Madrid do not mean the success in anywhere else of the world. For better customer satisfaction, having localised innovation centres and synergies between customer insight and innovative department would enable better understanding of local customer needs. However, localisation might  bring a higher cost to support their needs. 7 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management High costs of investment Although the more collaboration with external partners would be able to strengthen an open innovation, it also raises the costs of idea generation and expenses of more employee involvement. Increased investments are required to create a number of innovative projects. BBVA should consider implementing mechanisms for reducing the investment costs. Intellectual property (IP) As BBVA has launched many innovative projects, it is crucial that it has to focus on strategy that prevents the imitation from its competitors. BBVA may attempt to protect its innovations through patents, trademarks, copyrights or trade secrets. However, creating a barrier dependent on its unique skills should also be considered. The company’s belief in literatures regarding the open innovation framework This is a big danger of the company that believes in innovation literatures or theories. Some academics are still publishing the success cases of the innovation, sending the message that the implementation of the open innovation will be beneficial and bring more customers. Then the company will be able to provide better services. It is suspected that those literatures might base on the research conducted via interviewing the existing customers by leading questions. Carlsson C. and Walden P.(2007)14 discovered that although the research on TV mobile showed the evidence that there would be a higher demand, the situation went wrong when the product was launched into the market and found that the demand was not actually there. So, it is important to consider the reliable of the literatures. Employee’s attitudes Since the management team has embedded open innovation environment in BBVA, it may seem that its employee’s attitudes would concur with both outside-in and inside-out open innovation approaches. However, there is a lack of an evidence to prove that most 14 Carlsson C. and Walden P., 2007. Mobile TV – To Live or Die by Content. In: HICSS 2007, ed. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference, Waikoloa January 2007. Finland: System Science 2007, 1-9. 8 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management or all of BBVA’s employees agree with those approaches, or they would have to accept it because they have to follow the management’s policy. They might not be willing to support the company approach. It is therefore important that the BBVA’s management needs to encourage all employees to be continuously innovative and to get involved in the open innovation, not only the innovation centre but all sections in the organisation. 3.2 More open innovation at BBVA Launching a number of innovative projects, BBVA builds an international innovation network with many leading technology companies, academic institutions, and commercial organisations15. BBVA has to ensure that each of their partners is a bridge towards the inside and outside of the organisation. Moreover, in order to develop and speed up the pace of the open innovation in BBVA’s core business banking, BBVA may let the outsiders offer new technological knowledge or new innovation. Then, do business with those innovation suppliers and acquire that knowledge into BBVA’s innovation processes. Both BBVA and the suppliers would more directly engage with their core business that they set off parallel with banking innovation. BBVA’s Mobile banking service called â€Å"Compass† 16. is best described as the high level of partnership engagement between BBVA and many mobile phone  companies. BBVA does not know about technology on mobile phone. Likewise, mobile phone companies do not know how doing banking service, but the intellectual afford defined the project and linked them to work together. This is the open innovation because they try to learn more details and understand each core business. This new service might be a differentiation but it does not change in fundamental of banking business service. 15 Ensor B. (9 November 2012), Innovation Lessons from BBVA [online], BENJAMIN ENSOR’s BLOG, Available from: http://blogs.forrester.com/benjamin_ensor/12-11-09-innovation_lessons_from_bbva [1 October 2013] 16 PRNewswire (7 August 2013), Mobile banking update allows BBVA Compass customers to pay people using text, email [online], Yahoo Finance , Available from: < http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mobile-banking-allows-bbva-compass-152200662.html> [7 October 2013] 9 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management 4. Conclusion Although BBVA is claimed that it does not implement a fully open innovation, what BBVA has done by launching a number of innovative projects and increasing level of engagement of both outside-in and inside-out partners, might be proven that BBVA is ready to move forwards to a truly open innovation. However, outsourcing and service differentiation issues have been argued among the BBVA’s innovative projects. This might be led to a conclusion that BBVA has implemented a â€Å"slightly open innovation† approach. In addition, it is not to say that managing an open innovation approach is  without challenges. BBVA should have to prepare possible strategies to cope with potentials risks that might stem from both internal and external factors. 10 Innovation at BBVA Operations Management 5. References BBVA, 2012. BBVA Annual Report 2012 [online], BBVA, Available from: [2 October 2013] BBVA, 2012. BBVA Group Highlights [online], BBVA, Available from: < http://shareholdersandinvestors.bbva.com/TLBB/micros/bbva2012/en/Highlights/BBVAGroupHighlight s.html> [2 October 2013] Belcourt M., 2006. Outsourcing – The Benefits and the Risks. Journal of Human Resource Management Review, 16(2), 269-279. Carlsson C. and Walden P., 2007. Mobile TV – To Live or Die by Content. In: HICSS 2007, ed. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference, Waikoloa January 2007. Finland: System Science 2007, 1-9. Chesbrough, H. 2003. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Chesbrough, H. 2012. Open Innovation. Journal of Research-Technology Management, July-August 2012, 20-27. Chesbrough H et al. 2006. Open Innovation, Researching a New Paradigm. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1-12. Cloyd G. and Euchner J., 2012. Building Open Innovation at P&G. Journal of Journal of ResearchTechnology Management, July-August 2012, 14-19. Ensor B. (9 November 2012), Innovation Lessons from BBVA [online], BENJAMIN ENSOR’s BLOG, Available from: http://blogs.forrester.com/benjamin_ensor/12-11-09-innovation_lessons_from_bbva [1 October 2013] Lichtenthealer U. et al., 2011. Is your company ready for open innovation?. Journal of MIT Sloan Management Review, 53 (1), 45-48. PRNewswire (7 August 2013), Mobile banking update allows BBVA Compass customers to pay people using text, email [online], Yahoo Finance , Available from: < http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mobile-banking-allows-bbva-compass-152200662.html> [7 October 2013] Von Hippel E. (20 August 2013), User-driven innovation [online], BBVA Innovation Center, Available from:< http://www.centrodeinnovacionbbva.com/en/news/26230-user-driven-innovation > [1 October 2013] Ramis-Pujol J. and Drà ¶ege H., 2011. Case study of Innovation at BBVA. ESADE University. P&G Open Innovation (2013) What is Connect+Develop? [online], P&G, Available from: < http://www.pgconnectdevelop.com/home/pg_open_innovation.html> [7 October 2013] Zhu H. et al., 2001. Demand-driven service differentiation in cluster-based network servers. In: INFOCOM 2001, ed. 20th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Anchorage 22-26 April 2001. IEEE, 679 – 688, vol.2. 11

Deposits in thermal power plant condensers - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 16 Words: 4778 Downloads: 5 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Statistics Essay Did you like this example? Abstract: Unexpected fouling in condensers has always been one of the main operational concerns in thermal power plants. This paper describes an approach to predict fouling deposits in thermal power plant Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Deposits in thermal power plant condensers" essay for you Create order condensers by means of support vector machines (SVMs). The periodic fouling formation process and residual fouling phenomenon are analyzed. To improve the generalization performance of SVMs, an improved differential evolution algorithm is introduced to optimize the SVMs parameters. The prediction model based on optimized SVMs is used in a case study of 300MW thermal power station. The experiment result shows that the proposed approach has more accurate prediction results and better dynamic self-adaptive ability to the condenser operating conditions change than asymptotic model and T-S fuzzy model. Keywords: Fouling prediction; Condensers; Support vector machines; Differential evolution 1. Introduction Condenser is one of key equipments in thermal power plant thermodynamic cycle, and its thermal performance directly impacts the economic and safe operation of the overall plant [1]. Fouling of steam condenser tubes is one of the most important factors affecting their thermal performance, which reduces effectiveness and heat transfer capability with time [2, 3]. It is found that the maximum decrease in effectiveness due to fouling is about 55 and 78% for the evaporative coolers and condensers, respectively [2]. As a consequence, the formation of fouling in condenser of thermal power plants has special economic significance [4-6]. Furthermore, it represents the concerns of modem society in respect of conservation of limited resources, for the environment and the natural world, and for the improvement of industrial working conditions [6, 7]. The fouling of heat exchangers is a wide ranging topic coveting many aspects of technology, the designing and operating of condenser must contemplate and estimate the fouling resistance to the heat transfer. The knowledge of the progression and mechanisms of formation of fouling will allow a design of * Manuscript an appropriate fouling mitigation strategy such as optimal cleaning schedule to be made. The most common used models for fouling estimation are the thermal resistance method and heat transfer coefficient method [6-10]. However, the residual fouling of periodic fouling deposition process and the dynamic changes of heat exchanger operating condition are not considered in these models. Consequently, the estimation error of those methods is very large. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are capable of efficiently dealing with many industrial problems that cannot be handled with the same accuracy by other techniques. To eliminate most of the difficulties of traditional methods, ANNs are used to estimate and control the fouling of heat exchanger in recent years. Prieto et al [11] presented a model that uses non-fully connected feedforward artificial neural networks for the forecasting of a seawater-refrigerated power plant condenser performance. Radhakrishnan et al [12] developed a neural network based fouling model using historical plant operating data. Teruela et al [13] described a systematic approach to predict ash deposits in coal-fired boilers by means of artificial neural networks. To minimize the boiler energy and efficiency losses, Romeo and Gareta illustrated a hybrid system that combines neural networks and fuzzy logic expert systems to control boiler fouling and optimize boiler performance in [14]. Fan and Wang proposed diagonal recurrent neural network [15] and multiple RBF neural network [16] based models for measuring fouling in thermal power plant condenser. Although the technique of ANNs is able to estimate the fouling evolution of heat exchanger with satisfaction, there are some problems. The selection of structures and types of ANNs dependents on experience greatly, and the training of ANNs are based on empirical risk minimization (ERM) principle [18], which aims at minimizing the training errors. ANNs therefore face some disadvantages such as over-fitting, local optimal and bad generalization ability. Support vector machines (SVMs) are a new machine learning method deriving from statistical learning theory [18, 19]. Since later 1990s, SVMs are becoming more and more popular and have been successfully applied to many areas such as handwritten digit recognition, speaker identification, function approximation, chaotic time series forecasting, nonlinear control and so on [20-24]. Established on the theory of structural risk minimization (SRM) [19] principle, compared with ANNs, SVMs have some distinct advantages such as globally optimal, small sample-size, good generalization ability and resistant to the over-fitting problem [18-20]. In this paper, the use of SVMs model is developed for the predicting of a thermal power plant condenser. The prediction model was used in a case study of 300MW thermal power station. The experiment result shows that the prediction model based on SVMs is more precise than thermal resistance model and other methods, such as T-S fuzzy model [17]. Moreover, to improve the generalization performance of SVMs, an improved differential evolution algorithm is introduced to optimize the parameters of SVMs. 2. Periodic fouling process in condenser The accumulation of unwanted deposits on the surfaces of heat exchangers is usually referred to as fouling. In thermal power station condensers, fouling is mainly formed inside the condenser tubes, reducing heat transfer between the hot fluid (steam that condenses in the external surface of the tubes) and the cold water flowing through the tubes. The presence of the fouling represents a resistance to the transfer of heat and therefore reduces the efficiency of the condenser. In order to maintain or restore efficiency it is often necessary to clean condensers. The Taprogge system has found wide application in the power industry for the maintenance of condenser efficiency, which is one of on-line cleaning systems [6]. When the fouling accumulation in condensers reached a threshold, the sponge rubber balls cleaning system is activated, slightly oversized sponge rubber balls continuously passed through the tubes of the condenser by the water flow, and the fouling in the condenser is reduced or eliminated. The progresses of fouling accumulating and cleaning continue alternatively with time. Therefore, the fouling evolution in power plant condensers is periodic. However, the sponge rubber ball system is only effective of preventing the accumulation of waterborne mud, biofilm formation, scale and corrosion product deposition [6]. As for some of inorganic materials strongly attached on the inside surface of tubes, e.g. calcium and magnesium salts, can not be effectively reduced by this technique. As a result, at the end of every sponge rubber ball cleaning period, there still exist a lot of residual fouling in the condensers, and the residual fouling will be accumulated continuously with the time. Where, the fouling can be cleaned by the Taprogge system is called soft fouling, and those can not be cleaned residual fouling is called hard fouling. When the residual fouling accumulated to some degree, the cleaning techniques that can eliminate them, such as chemistry cleaning method, should be used. Generally, the foul degree of heat exchanger is expressed as fouling thermal resistance, defined as the difference between rates of deposition and removal [6]. In this paper, the corresponding fouling thermal resistance of soft fouling and hard fouling expressed as Rfs and Rfh, respectively. Then, the condenser fouling thermal resistance Rf in any time is the sum of soft fouling thermal resistance and hard fouling thermal resistance, expressed as Eq. (1). ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) 0 0 0 R t R t R t R t R t t R t t f fs fh f fs fh ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (1) where ( ) 0 R t f is the initial fouling. Fig. 1 periodic fouling evolution in power plant condensers Fig. 1 demonstrates the periodic evolution process of fouling in power plant condensers. In fact, the evolution process of fouling in a condenser is very complex, which is related to a great number of variables, such as condenser pressure, cooling water hardness, the velocity of the circulating water and the corresponding inlet and outlet temperatures, the non-condensing gases present in the condenser, and so on. The Rfs(t) and Rfh(t) expressed a very complex physical and chemical process, their accurate mathematic models are very hard to be obtained. Hence, measurement and prediction of fouling development is a very difficult task. Since the fouling evolution process is a very complex nonlinear dynamic system, the traditional techniques based on mathematic analysis, i.e. asymptotic fouling model, are not efficient to describe it [11]. SVMs, as a small sample method to deal with the highly nonlinear classification and regression problems based on statistic learning theory, is expected to be able to reproduce the nonlinear behavior of the system. 3. SVMs regression and parameters 3.1 SVMs regression SVMs are a group of supervised learning methods that can be applied to classification or regression. SVMs represent an extension to nonlinear models of the generalized portrait algorithm developed by Vladimir Vapnik [18]. The SVMs algorithm is based on the statistical learning theory and the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension introduced by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis [19]. Here, the SVMs regression is applied to forecast the fouling in power plant condensers. Let the given training data sets represented as ?( , ), ( , ), , ( , )? 1 1 2 2 n n D ? x y x y ? ? ? x y , where d i x ? R is an input vector, y R i ? is its corresponding desired output, and n is the number of training data. In SVMs, the original input space is mapped into a high dimensional space called feature space by a nonlinear mapping x ? g(x) . Let f (x) be the SVM outputs corresponding to input vector x. In the feature space, a linear function is constructed: f (x) ? wT g(x) ? b (2) where w is a coefficient vector, b is a threshold. The learning of SVMs can be obtained by minimization of the empirical risk on the training data. Where, ? -intensive loss function is used to minimize the empirical risk. The loss function is defined as L? (x, y, f ) ? y ? f (x) ? max(0, y ? f (x) ) e (3) where ? is a positive parameter to allow approximation errors smaller than ? , the empirical risk is ? n i emp i i L x y f n R w 1 ( , , ) 1 ( ) ? (4) Besides using ? -intensive loss, SVMs tries to reduce model complexity by minimizing 2 w , which can be described by slack variables. Introduce variables i ? and i , then SVMs regression is obtained as the following optimization problem: min ? ? ? ? n i i i w C 1 2 ( ? ) 2 1 ? ? (5) s.t. i i i y ? f (x ) ? ? , i i i f (x ) ? y ? ? , i ? , i ? 0 where C is a positive constant to be regulated. By using the Lagrange multiplier method [18], the minimization of (5) becomes the problem of maximizing the following dual optimization problem max ( ? )( ? ) ( , ) 2 1 ( ? ) ( ? ) 1 1 , 1 j j i j n i j i i n i i i i i n i i ? y ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? K x x ? ? ? (6) s.t. ( ? ) 0 1 ? ? ? ? n i i i ? ? ,C = i , i ? =0 where i and i ? are Lagrange multipliers, and kernel ( , ) i j K x x is a symmetric function which is equivalent to the dot product in the feature space. The kernel ( , ) i j K x x is defined as the following. ( , ) ( ) ( ) j T i j i K x x ? g x g x (7) There are some kernels, i.e. polynomial kernel K(x, y) ? (x ? y ? 1) d and hyperbolic tangent kernel ( , ) tanh( ( ) ) 1 2 K x y ? c x ? y ? c can be used. Where the Gaussian function is used as the kernel. ) 2 ( , ) exp( 2 2 ? x y K x y ? ? ? (8) Replacing i i i ? ? ? ? ? ? and relation 0 ? ? ? ? i , then the optimization of (6) is rewritten as max ( , ) 2 1 1 1 , 1 j i j n i j i n i i i n i i ? y ? ? ? ? ? K X X ? ? ? ? ? (9) s.t. 0 1 ? ? ? n i i ? ,C ? i ? ? ? C The learning results for training data set D can be derived from equation (9). Note that only some of coefficients i ? are not zeros and the corresponding vectors x are called support vectors (SV). That is, only those vectors whose corresponding coefficients i i are not zero are SV. Then the regression function is expressed as equation (10). f x K x x b i j p i i i ? ? ? ( ) ( ? ) ( , ) 1 ? ? (10) It should be noted that p is the numbers of SV, and the constant b is expressed as ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? p i i i i i p i i i i i b y K x x y K x x 1 1 min ( ? ) ( , ) max ( ? ) ( , ) 2 1 ? ? ? ? (11) 3.2 SVM parameters The quality of SVMs models strongly depends on a proper setting of parameters and SVMs approximation performance is sensitive to parameters [25, 26]. Parameters to be regulated include hyper-parameters C, ? and kernel parameter? , if the Gaussian kernel is used [25]. The values of C, ? and ? are relate to the actual object model and there are not fixed for different data set. So the problem of parameter selection is complicated. The values of parameter C, ? and ? affect model complexity in a different way. The parameter C determines the trade-off between model complexity and the tolerance degree of deviations larger than ? . The parameter? controls the width of the ? -insensitive zone and can affect the numbers of SV in optimization problem. The kernel parameter? determines the kernel width and relates to the input range of the training data set. Here, parameters selection is regarded as compound optimization problem and an improved differential evolution algorithm is proposed to select suitable parameters value. 4. Improved Differential Evolution Differential evolution (DE) algorithm is a simple but powerful population-based stochastic search technique for solving global optimization problems [27]. DE has three operations: mutation, crossover and selection. The crucial idea behind DE is a scheme for generating trial vectors. Mutation and crossover are used to generate trial vectors, and selection then determines which of the vectors will survive into the next generation. The original DE algorithm is described in the following briefly. 4.1 Basic differential evolution Let S ? Rn be the search space of the problem under consideration. Then, the DE algorithm utilizes NP, n-dimensional vectors X x x xt S i NP in t i t i t i ( , , , ) , 1,2, , 1 2 ? ? ? ? ? as a population for each generation of the algorithm. t denotes one generation. The initial population is generated randomly and should cover the whole parameter space. In each population, two operators, namely mutation and crossover, are applied on each individual to yield a trial vector for each target vector. Then, a selection phase takes place to determine the trial vector enters the population of the next generation or not. For each target individual t i X , a mutant vector { 1 , , 1} 1 ?1 ? ? t ? n t t i V v ? v is determined by the following equation. ( ) 1 2 3 1 t r t r t r t i V ? ? X ? F ? X ? X (12) Where F ? 0 is a real parameter, called mutation constant, which controls the amplification of the difference vector ( ) 2 3 t r t r X ? X to avoid search stagnation. According to Storn and Price [27], the F is set in (0, 2]. 1 r , 2 r , 3 r are indexes, randomly selected from the set {1,2,, NP} . Note that indexes must be different from each other and from the running index i so that NP must be a least four. Following the mutation phase, the crossover (recombination) operator is applied on the population. For each mutant vector t ?1 i V , a trial vector { 1 , , 1} 1 ?1 ? ? t ? n t t i U u ? u is generated, using the following scheme. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ( ) ( ) 1 , ( ) ( ) 1 x rand j CR and j randn i v rand j CR or j randn i u t ij t t ij ij (13) Where j=1, 2, ?, n. rand( j) is the jth evaluation of a uniform random number generator within [0, 1]. CR is a crossover probability constant in the range [0, 1], which has to be determined previously by the user. randn(i) ? (1,2,,n) is a randomly chosen index which ensures that t ?1 i U gets at least one element from t ?1 i V . Otherwise, no new parent vector would be produced and the population would not alter. To decide whether the trial vector t ?1 i U should be a member of the population comprising the next generation, it is compared to the corresponding target vector t i X , and the greedy selection strategy is adopted in DE. The selection operator is as following. ? ? ? ? ? ? , otherwise 1 , ( 1 ) ( ) 1 t i t i t i t t i i X U f U f X X . (14) 4.2 Modification of Mutation From the mutation Eq. (12) we can see that in the original DE three vectors are chosen at random for mutation and the base vector is then chosen at random within the three, which has an exploratory effect but it slows down the convergence of DE. In order to accelerate the convergence speed, a modified mutation scheme is adopted. The randomly selected three vectors for mutation are sorted by ascending in terms of the fitness function value. The tournament best vector is t tb x , the better vector is t tm x and the worst vector is t tw x . For speeding up convergence, the base vector in the mutation equation should select t tb x , and the direction of difference vector should direct to t tm x , that is to choose ( t ) tw t tm x ? x as the difference vector. Then the new modified mutation strategy is as following Eq. (15). 1 ( t ) tw t tm t tb t i v ? ? x ? F ? x ? x . (15) After such modification, this process explores the region around each t tb x in the direction of ( t ) tw t tm x ? x for each mutated point. The mutation operator is not random search any more, but a determinate search. However, the vectors for mutation are selected randomly in the population space, so in the whole evolutionary process it is still a random search, which can ensure the global optimization performance of the algorithm [28]. 5 Optimization procedures of IDE for SVMs 5.1 Objective function The objective of SVMs parameters optimization is to minimize deviations between the outputs of training data and the outputs of SVMs. Where, the mean square error (MSE) is used as the performance criterion. 2 1 1 ( ( , ))2 1 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? K k k k y f x w K Obj (16) Where K is the number of training data, k y is the output of the kth training data, and f (x ,w) k is the output of SVMs correspond to input k x . Then the objective of the IDE is to search optimal parameter C, ? and ? to minimize Obj: min F(C,? ,? ) ? minObj (17) Generally, the search range of these parameters is C? [1, 1000], ? ? (0, 1], ? ? (0, 0.5]. For special problem, the search range is changeable. 5.2 Optimization procedures The searching procedures of the improved differential evolution (IDE) for optimization of SVMs parameters are shown as below. Step1: Input the training data and test data, select the Gaussian kernel function. Step2: Specify the number of population NP, the difference vector scale factor F, the crossover probability constant CR, and the maximum number of generations T. Initialize randomly the individuals, i.e. C, ? and ? , of the population and the trial vector in the given searching space. Set the current generation t=0. Step3: Use each individual as the control parameters of SVMs, train the SVMs using training data. Step4: Calculate the fitness value of each individual in the population using the objective function given by equation (17). Step5: Compare each individual?s fitness value and get the best fitness and best individual. Step6: Generate a mutant vector according to equation (15) for each individual. Step7: According to equation (13), do the crossover operation and yield a trial vector. Step8: Execute the selection operation in terms of equation (14) and generate a new population. Step9: t=t+1, return to Step3 until to the maximum number of generations. 6 Case study 6.1 Fouling prediction scheme The formation and development of fouling in condensers is influenced not only by cooling water hardness and turbidity but also by working conditions of condensers, such as velocity of the cooling water and the corresponding inlet and outlet temperatures, the saturation temperature of steam under entrance pressure of condenser, the non-condensing gases present in the condenser, and so on. According to the previous analysis of periodic fouling process of power plant condensers, the fouling can be classified as soft fouling and hard fouling. Therefore, two SVMs models are developed to forecast thermal resistance of soft and hard fouling, respectively. Then, the whole prediction fouling thermal resistance ( f R? ) in condenser is the sum of output of soft fouling prediction model ( fs R? ) and output of hard fouling prediction model ( fh R? ). Generally, the evolution of soft fouling is determined by the velocity (v), turbidity (d), inlet (Ti) and outlet temperatures (To) of cooling water, saturation temperature of steam under entrance pressure of condenser (Ts), and prediction time range (Tp) (the running time in a sponge rubber ball cleaning period). Therefore, these variables are chosen as inputs of the soft fouling thermal resistance predictive model. As for hard fouling of the class of calcium and magnesium salts, it is related to the residual fouling at the beginning and the end of previous sponge rubber ball cleaning period (corresponding thermal resistance is Rfb,n-1, Rfe,n-1, respectively), hardness of cooling water (s), saturation temperature of steam under entrance pressure of condenser (Ts), and the accumulating running time of condenser (Ta). Hence, those variables are chosen as the inputs of hard fouling thermal resistance prediction model. The soft and hard fouling prediction model based on SVMs illustrated in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3, respectively. ( , ) 1 K x x ( , ) 2 K x x ( , ) p?1 K x x ( , ) p K x x 1 1 2 2 1 1 ? ? ? ? p p ? ? p p ( , ) 1 K x x ( , ) 2 K x x ( , ) p?1 K x x ( , ) p K x x S b Ts 1 1 2 2 1 1 ? ? ? ? p p ? ? p p Ta Rfh Rfb,n-1 R fe,n-1 ? ^ Fig. 2 Soft fouling prediction model Fig. 3 Hard fouling prediction model The parameters of the two prediction models are optimized by the IDE algorithm. Fig. 4 illustrates the fouling prediction model using SVMs optimized by IDE. ? Fig. 4 fouling prediction model based on SVMs optimized by IDE 6.2 Experiment results In this section, experiments on N-3500-2 condenser (300MW) in Xiangtan thermal power plant are carried out to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The cooling water of this plant is river water that pumped from the Xiangjiang river. The Taprogge systems are installed in the plant to on-line clean the condensers. At present, the condenser is cleaned every two days using the Taprogge system, and every cleaning time is about 6 hours. Obviously, the fitted cleaning period is not optimal, because the fouling accumulating process is dynamic changing with the operating conditions changing. The experiment system consists of sensors for operating condition parameters measuring, data acquisition system, PC-type computer, etc. A set of 1362 real-time running data in different operating conditions in 84 cleaning periods is collected to train and optimize the SVMs model for fouling prediction, another set of 300 data is chosen for model verification. The proposed IDE is used to optimize the SVMs parameters. The control parameters of IDE are the following. The number of population is 30, the crossover probability constant CR is 0.5, the mutation factor F is 0.5, and the maximum number of generations is 100. The selection of above parameters is based on the literature [27] and [28]. After application of IDE, the optimal SVMs parameters of soft fouling prediction model are C=848, ? =0.513, ? =0.0117, the optimal SVMs parameters of hard fouling prediction model are C=509, ? =0.732, ? =0.0075. The velocity, turbidity, and inlet temperature of cooling water is different in summer and winter, the evolution of fouling in condensers is also different in the two seasons. In the experiments, four sponge rubber ball cleaning periods in different seasons are investigated. Among them, three periods, i.e. the first, 18th and 40th period, are in summer, and the other period is in winter. The hardness and turbidity of cooling water is 56mg/L and 17mg/L in summer, and is 56mg/L and 29mg/L in winter. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the comparison between the SVMs model, T-S fuzzy logic model [17] and asymptotic model is considered. The asymptotic model is obtained by probability analysis method, and the corresponding expression is the following [17]. ( ) ? 41.3?[1? ?(t ?1.204) /14.57 ] f R t e (17) Table 1 and Table 2 show the fouling thermal resistance prediction results of the above three models in the first and the 18th cleaning periods, respectively. From the Table 1 and Table 2, we can see that compared with tradition asymptotic model and T-S fuzzy logic model, the SVMs based prediction model has higher prediction precision. Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 show the predicted fouling thermal resistance evolution based on the optimized SVMs model and asymptotic model. Fig.6 clearly shows that the asymptotic model is not able to forecast the fouling evolution process at the beginning stage of the 18th cleaning period, the reason is that the residual fouling in the periodic fouling formation process is not considered in the asymptotic models. Table 1 fouling thermal resistance prediction results in the first cleaning period Running time Tpa (hour) Operating conditions Measuring values Rf (K.m2/kW) Prediction values (K.m2/kW) Relative error v(m/s) Ti(?) Ts(?) SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model 0 2.0 19.1 33.2 0.0258 0.0260 0.0258 0.62 0 5 2.0 18.5 33.3 0.0995 0.0992 0.1018 0.0947 0.26 2.31 4.82 10 2.0 15.6 31.9 0.2028 0.2037 0.2007 0.1872 0.45 1.04 7.69 15 2.0 14.3 31.6 0.2501 0.2494 0.2411 0.2528 0.27 3.6 1.08 20 2.0 15.5 33.5 0.2865 0.2864 0.2830 0.2993 0.03 1.22 4.48 25 2.0 15.5 34.0 0.3174 0.3172 0.3123 0.3323 0.06 1.61 4.69 30 2.0 16.1 34.8 0.3420 0.3393 0.3321 0.3558 0.79 2.89 4.04 35 2.0 14.4 34.6 0.3567 0.3562 0.3497 0.3724 0.14 1.96 4.40 40 2.0 14.2 34.9 0.3722 0.3736 0.3600 0.3842 0.37 3.28 3.22 Table 2 fouling thermal resistance prediction results of the 18th cleaning period Running time Ta (hour) Operating conditions Measuring values Rf (K.m2/kW) Prediction values (K.m2/kW) Relative error v(m/s) Ti(?) Ts(?) SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model 632 2.0 14.0 29.8 0.0774 0.0791 0.074 2.26 0 637 2.0 14.2 30.9 0.1772 0.1773 0.1850 0.0947 0.06 4.40 46.56 642 2.0 12.5 30.4 0.2474 0.2479 0.2438 0.1872 0.21 1.46 24.33 647 2.0 11.9 30.4 0.2898 0.2908 0.2955 0.2528 0.36 1.97 12.77 652 2.0 10.6 30.1 0.3230 0.3222 0.3354 0.2993 0.25 3.84 7.34 657 2.0 11.4 31.5 0.3447 0.3437 0.3525 0.3323 0.28 2.26 3.60 662 2.0 10.2 31.2 0.3655 0.3652 0.3648 0.3558 0.08 0.19 2.65 667 2.0 10.7 32.0 0.3831 0.3815 0.3767 0.3724 0.42 1.67 2.79 672 2.0 11.8 33.5 0.3985 0.3978 0.3912 0.3842 0.18 1.83 3.59 To eliminate the influence of residual fouling and improve the prediction precision, an improved asymptotic models are introduced in [17] according to the probability analysis method. The improved asymptotic model of the 40th cleaning period is the following [17]. ( ) ? 41.3?[1? ?(t ?4.31) /14.57 ] f R t e (18) Fig. 5 predicted fouling thermal resistance evolution Fig. 6 predicted fouling thermal resistance evolution in the first cleaning period in the 18th cleaning period At the 27th hour of the cleaning period, the velocity of cooling water increased from 2.0m/s to 2.5m/s to adapt the steam load change, and the experiment result shows in Table 3. From the Table 3, we can see that from 0 to the 27th hour in this cleaning period, the improved asymptotic model is able to well forecast the fouling evolution. At the time of 27th hour, the velocity of cooling water increased suddenly, and the fouling thermal resistance will slowly increase after decreasing a period of time. However, the improved asymptotic model is not able to forecast the tendency. The models of SVMs and T-S fuzzy logic are able to predict the tendency, but the SVMs model has more accurate results than T-S model. Fig. 7 demonstrates the predicted fouling thermal resistance evolution based on the optimized SVMs model and the improved asymptotic model. Table 3 fouling thermal resistance prediction results of the 40th cleaning period Running time Ta (hour) Operating conditions Measuring values Rf (K.m2/kW) Prediction values (K.m2/kW) Relative error v(m/s) Ti(?) Ts(?) SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model 1289 2.0 10.5 28.4 0.1065 0.1070 0.1066 0.1058 0.47 0.01 0.66 1294 2.0 10.1 28.6 0.2031 0.2011 0.2026 0.1950 0.98 0.25 3.99 1299 2.0 10.8 30.1 0.2660 0.2676 0.2574 0.2583 0.60 3.23 2.89 1304 2.0 12.0 32.0 0.3130 0.3161 0.3053 0.3032 0.99 2.46 3.13 1309 2.0 12.5 32.9 0.3422 0.3408 0.3398 0.3351 0.41 0.70 2.07 1314 2.5 11.1 32.3 0.3672 0.3687 0.3625 0.3578 0.41 1.28 2.56 1316 2.5 10.1 32.0 0.3734 0.3728 0.3712 0.3648 0.16 0.59 2.30 1319 2.5 10.0 32.2 0.3173 0.3152 0.3327 0.3738 0.66 4.85 17.81 1324 2.5 11.7 33.5 0.3048 0.3054 0.3135 0.3852 0.20 2.85 26.38 1329 2.5 13.2 34.8 0.3079 0.3097 0.3202 0.3933 0.58 3.99 27.73 Fig. 7 predicted fouling thermal resistance evolution Fig. 8 predicted fouling thermal resistance evolution in the 40th cleaning period in the 85th cleaning period The 85th cleaning period in winter is also considered in the experiment to further evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Table 4 shows the fouling thermal resistance prediction results of this period. From the Table 4 we can observe that the prediction model based on the optimized SVMs has more satisfactory results than the improved asymptotic model and T-S model. Fig. 8 demonstrates the predicted fouling thermal resistance evolution based on the optimized SVMs model and the improved asymptotic model. Table 4 fouling thermal resistance prediction results of the 85th cleaning period Running time Ta (hour) Operating conditions Measuring values Rf (K.m2/kW) Prediction values (K.m2/kW) Relative error v(m/s) Ti(?) Ts(?) SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model SVMs model T-S model Asymptotic model 2830 2.0 2.5 24.9 0.1594 0.1698 0.1632 0.1058 0.99 2.38 33.63 2835 2.0 2.6 25.4 0.2467 0.2541 0.2345 0.1950 0.64 4.95 20.96 2840 2.0 2.8 26.3 0.3055 0.3065 0.2827 0.2583 0.01 7.46 15.45 2845 2.0 2.6 27.1 0.3410 0.3414 0.3177 0.3032 0.12 6.83 11.09 2850 2.0 2.5 27.7 0.3696 0.3702 0.3548 0.3351 0.17 4.01 9.33 2855 2.5 2.4 28.1 0.3891 0.3932 0.3776 0.3578 1.05 2.96 8.04 2860 2.5 2.4 29.2 0.4005 0.4003 0.3883 0.3648 0.05 3.05 8.92 2865 2.5 2.6 29.6 0.4087 0.4075 0.3979 0.3738 0.28 2.64 8.54 2870 2.5 2.7 29.4 0.4138 0.4132 0.4062 0.3852 0.14 1.84 6.91 7 Conclusions The fouling accumulating process in condensers is very complex, which is influenced by a lot of operating conditions. Hence, fouling prediction is a very difficult task, and the traditional techniques, such as asymptotic fouling model and heat transfer coefficient method, are not efficient to describe it. In this paper, the condenser fouling forecasting model based on SVMs was proposed. The parameters of the SVMs model were optimized by an improved differential evolution. Practice application experiment results show that, compared with traditional asymptotic model, the forecasting model based on optimized SVMs is able to effectively eliminate the influence of residual fouling to forecasting accuracy, has good dynamic self-adaptive ability and can obtain satisfactory forecasting accuracy when the condenser operating conditions varied in a large range. The proposed approach is also compared with the T-S fuzzy logic model, experiment results in four different cleaning periods present that the optimized SVMs model has higher forecasting accuracy than T-S model. The relevance of these results shows that the technique of support vector machines is able to estimate well the evolution of the fouling in thermal power plant condensers without being much affected by the operating conditions change and periodic residual fouling, and the general principles of application of SVMs developed here would be useful in other problems of fouling. Acknowledgement: This work was partly supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (Grant no. 2008AA04Z214, 2007AA04Z244), the State Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 60835004, 60775047), the Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department (08C337), and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University. References: