Published on: 22 December 2018
Last Updated on: 20 July 2024
Horizontal directional drilling is a relatively new practice for installing pipes and cables underground. Many other practices like Rotary Drilling exist but here we will talk about directional drilling. Although the more conventional method of open trenching is still relevant today, directional drilling is slowly becoming a preferred process due to its inherent benefits. Most projects involving laying pipelines for utilities and cables for telecommunication face the challenge of obstruction and limited work area, hence the need to minimize the disturbance while at the same time ensure that the pipes installed are sturdy and high-quality.
What is horizontal directional drilling?
The simplest way to understand the process of directional drilling is the use of a special rig to create an underground borehole to produce a path where pipes will be installed. This special rig consists of a drill head with an automatic tracking device which allows the operator to navigate the pre-set route underground. Drilling fluid gets added in as the drill bit passes through the soil, to prevent the hole from collapsing. After the drill bit exits the pilot borehole, a reamer gets pulled back to increase the borehole diameter. Once the desired width is reached, piping gets pulled back into the hole for final installation.
Benefits of horizontal directional drilling:
There are many horizontal directional drilling companies today that engage in this trade because it is always in demand. The following are the benefits of choosing directional drilling over the conventional trenching method to install pipes.
Pipeline durability. The precise process of installing pipes using directional drilling prevents damage during installation. Horizontal directional drilling also allows for installing pipes under rivers, highways, and driveways which minimizes exposure to elements that may lead to wear and tear.
Faster pipe installation. Perhaps one of the most notable benefits of horizontal directional drilling is how it cuts down the time needed to complete a project. With less ground disturbance, it won’t take long to fix the job site, and you won’t need as many workers as you would when you need to dig an open trench. Faster work also means less upfront cost for the contractor. Thus, if you can reduce operational expenses, you can increase profit margins in return.
Better for the environment. If you are installing pipes in a residential area, homeowners are often concerned with the amount of disruption to the landscape. This is not the case with directional drilling. Although there is still some disturbance, it is only minimal and quickly restored. The process does not contaminate soil and groundwater as much as open trenching does. Directional drilling also helps preserve the environment and protect rock formations and bodies of water such as rivers and streams.
Flexibility in project locations. Installing pipes underneath concrete sidewalks and densely populated cities is not an issue if you employ directional drilling. In fact, directional drilling was designed to address the challenge of working on challenging locations with above-ground obstructions.
In the past, it would be virtually impossible to imagine or perhaps too costly to install pipes in the most challenging urban settings. But nowadays, directional drilling makes all of these possible which is why it has revolutionized the utility industry within the last several decades.
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Thinking of getting a managed IT service for your business? While this is a great idea since there are so many benefits of having professionals handling your technology so that you can focus on your business, it quite a complex process to find the right managed IT service providers for your business. You have to ask yourself and the service providers many crucial questions before you can finalize one service provider.
But before we get to the questions, let’s see why you should hire a managed IT service in the first place:
IT Managed Service Organize Your Mess:
You are busy working out the business strategies to achieve growth and development, but who is handling your technology? If you have an in-house IT professional taking care of it all, you’re good to go. But do they have to tools as technology to manage your data properly? Chances are, they don’t. Because the complex nature of the tech and equipment required to organize and secure your data are usually handled by managed IT service firms. This is why hiring a managed IT service is always a good idea.
What You Need To Know About Managed IT Service Before Hiring Them:
While Managed It services to help you increase your efficiency with their fast and dynamic technology, you have to make sure that the providers you are choosing fit with your business and your requirements.
Here are a few things you need to know from your managed service provider before signing a contract with them :
1. Can They Handle Your Business Size?
Your business will grow, and so will your technology needs with it. Your managed service provider needs to be capable of handling complex technological needs that you have currently and will have as your business gets larger and larger. Additionally, knowing whether your service provider has worked in your field or not, will help create a better communication between the two parties.
2. What Will They Provide That An In-House Technician Can’t?
An in-house technology professional can prove to be cost efficient and helpful. So, why shouldn’t you hire an in-house professional and should go for IT managed service provider? Your service provider should be able to reduce your compliance risk and solve the IT issues you and your business face on a recurring basis. They should be able to provide you with high security for your data and options to recover any data before anything critical happens.
3. How Flexible Are They?
A managed IT service that is not flexible enough in their billing and the service package you need, is highly unlikely to stay with your company for too long a time. As your business grows, and times and technology changes, your needs will change too. Changing service providers every time you have a new need wastes a lot of time and money. Thus look for a provider that provider flexibility in both billing as well as services. Not only will it ensure that they ‘re efficient on their end, but also increase the chances of the two parties going a long way together.
Hiring a Managed IT service may be a little tricky but it comes with a lot of perks like improved internal communication, efficiency, organized, secure and recoverable data among many others. Asking the right questions and directing the conversation in the direction where you needs lie will help you find the right It managed services fit for your business.
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Automation testing uses software tools and scripts to automatically perform tests on a software application. Automation of mobile app performance testing involves running tests previously designed and developed by testers and developers to ensure that an application is functioning correctly and efficiently.
The tests that developers run during automation testing can vary depending on the application being tested and the specific requirements of the testing process. Some standard tests that developers may run during automation testing include:
Functional Testing: This testing checks whether the software app meets its functional requirements. Functional testing ensures that the application behaves as intended and that all its features and functionalities work correctly.
Regression Testing: Regression testing helps check whether changes to the application or system have introduced new issues or caused any existing problems to resurface. It helps to ensure that previously working features of the application are still working correctly after recent changes or updates.
Integration Testing: This testing aims to identify any compatibility issues between these components or modules and ensures that they work seamlessly together.
Performance Testing: Performance testing verifies app performance under high traffic or heavy usage. This testing type helps identify performance bottlenecks and ensures the application meets the required performance criteria.
Developers use various automation testing tools to run these tests, such as Selenium, TestComplete, and Appium. These tools allow developers to create automated test scripts that simulate user actions, interact with the application's graphical user interface (GUI), and validate the results of the tests.
Automation Testing In Retail
Businesses must constantly find ways to differentiate themselves and offer better customer experiences. One area where retailers can gain a significant advantage is by implementing automation testing. In the retail sector, automation testing can help improve critical systems' speed, accuracy, and reliability, leading to improved customer experiences, better business outcomes, and increased profits.
Here are some benefits
Improved Efficiency: Automation software testing in retail helps to speed up the testing process, allowing retailers to identify and fix issues more quickly. This, in turn, improves overall operation efficiency, leading to improved CX.
Improved Accuracy: Automation testing eliminates the risk of human error, ensuring that all critical functionalities are thoroughly tested. This improves retail system reliability.
Cost Reduction: Automation testing tools are generally more cost-effective than manual testing, reducing the need for a large team of testers, reducing costs, and increasing profitability.
Scalability: Automation testing allows retailers to quickly scale up their testing efforts to meet changing demands, ensuring critical systems are available when customers need them.
Competitive Advantage: E-commerce app testing automation helps retailers to stay competitive by offering seamless and reliable experiences across all channels.
Compliance: Automation testing helps retailers to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of non-compliance and associated costs.
Improved Customer Satisfaction: Automation testing ensures critical systems perform optimally, leading to enhanced customer experiences and increased brand loyalty.
Better Business Outcomes: Automation testing improves business outcomes by reducing errors, increasing efficiency, and improving customer experiences.
Faster Time-to-Market: Automation testing enables retailers to release new features and updates more quickly, reducing the time-to-market and keeping up with changing customer demands.
Future-Proofing: Automation testing helps retailers to future-proof their systems by identifying and fixing issues before they become significant problems, ensuring that their systems remain reliable and up-to-date.
Automation Testing Challenges
Test Script Maintenance: Test script maintenance is a significant challenge in automation testing. Test scripts must be updated as software applications evolve to reflect application functionality changes. The time and resources required to maintain test scripts can be significant, particularly for complex applications. Test script maintenance is critical to ensure that automated tests remain effective and reliable over time.
Tool Selection: Selecting the right automation testing tools is another significant challenge. Choosing the right tool requires careful consideration of factors such as the application being tested, the testing environment, the team's skills, and the budget available.
Test Data Management: Test data management is another significant challenge in automation testing. Test data must be accurate, representative of real-world scenarios, and relevant to the test case being executed. Test data management is critical to ensure that tests accurately reflect real-world scenarios and identify potential issues before they impact end users.
Integration with Development Process: Integrating automation testing with the software development process is a significant challenge. Automation testing must be integrated with other software development processes, such as continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, to ensure testing efforts align with development activities. This requires significant planning and coordination to ensure that testing efforts do not slow down development and that testing results are delivered in a timely and actionable manner.
Addressing these challenges requires a coordinated and strategic approach to automation testing. Effective automation testing requires a team with the right skills, tools, and processes to ensure that automation testing efforts are reliable and deliver the desired results.
Conclusion
In conclusion, automation testing is becoming increasingly important in the retail sector. It helps businesses improve their critical systems' efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, improving customer experiences and increasing profitability. By investing in automation testing, retailers can stay competitive in an increasingly crowded marketplace and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. In today's fast-paced retail landscape, automation testing is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for success.
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Plastic and plastic polymers are very useful elements that form an important part of our daily lives. Anyone can find in nearly every product we use. Manufactured and synthetic polymers scientifically discovered and introduced for consumption usage in the 17th and 18th century. Ever since then they have helped improve the quality of human life by helping humanity in a wide variety of ways. You may be wondering what the difference is between plastic and polymers — and the key distinction is that plastic is a specific type of polymer.
Plastics manufacturers make plastics from a chain of polymers, where polymers manufacturers compose polymers of smaller, and uniform molecules. Humans would never have designed and developed a number of everyday products and articles if plastics had not been invented. If we are to ascertain the usage of strong and lightweight plastics, we find that they have contributed immensely in the automobile and aviation industries, making cars and airplanes significantly lighter, thereby cutting down drastically on the total value of energy required to make them operational. Plastic usage in such industries has also led to a reduction in emissions.
What are plastic polymers?
Plastic is not a naturally occurring material in nature which means that they are synthetically produced in laboratories and factories. Polymers usually bind with substances occurring organically in nature and create newer properties and elements. For example, synthetic polymers comprise of collective materials like polyethylene, nylon, and polyester that have a percentage of organic mixtures.
Synthetic polymers combined with organic compounds which plastic producers found in everyday consumer products like optical devices, adhesives, textiles, automobiles, foams, and coatings. Aside from that one can also use in medical devices, packaging products, and other things.
How is plastic made?
The complex compound of plastic usually evolves from elements occurring naturally in the world. After all, researchers have stated before. Organic elements like crude oil, natural gas, cellulose, and salt are a few of the naturally found elements that plastic producers use in the production of plastic. Crude oil is a complex mixture of thousands of compounds. Polymer manufacturers mainly process this before you are using this.
The first step of the production of plastic begins by processing crude oil. In other words, crude oil starts as the base element, which is then technologically separated into segments, divisions, and elements. This is mainly variable mixtures of hydrocarbons. Each of these elements varies from one another in shape, structure, and size.
The complex mix of chains of hydrocarbons is instrumental in creating polymers, which are of a synthetic nature through twin processes of polymerization and polycondensation. Once these two processes are complete, the polymer chains need to be converted into the finished products. The final product is a result of one of two things: extrusion or injection molding.
Extrusion vs. Injection Molding:
There are several differences between the two, but the first thing to know about the injection molding process is that it uses a die. This is essentially a recreation of the object that you wish to produce, however it takes on the appearance of a container. This container is “injected” with the plastic substance which will then harden and take on the form of the product. Once the cooling is complete, polymer manufacturers demold the component.
Manufacturers such as Solex Thermal Science have created processes that make the injection molding process more efficient and inexpensive. Their heat exchanger is capable of handling any relatively free-flowing powder or crystalline bulk solids. This new heat exchanger technology makes it the perfect candidate to heat and cool polymers in an energy efficient manner.
This exchanger heats and cools to uniform temperatures while using up to 90% less energy. Controlling the temperature of the polymer is an important step in maintaining product quality and ensuring a consistent capacity. In comparison to traditional technologies, such as the drum dryer, which uses a large quantity of hot air to direct dry the product, this solution separates the heat transfer and moisture removal components, significantly reducing energy consumption.
Extrusion uses a different process as it also uses a die, but in a completely different manner. During the extrusion molding process, plastic manufacturers melt the plastic materials and place into the die under pressure. In this case, however, the die will eject the material and it will take on the form of said die. Plastic manufacturers complete this procedure in a continuous manner. Even they sometimes consider to be a bit faster than standard injection molding.
How It Shapes Up:
Once these processes are complete, after that plastic manufacturers determine the purpose of the plastic. It takes its permanent shape or form and polymer manufacturer industry transfers to its final destination.
In the end, all plastic production processes take the same steps but some may be more time and cost efficient. The key is to look for agents in the plastics supply chain that provide optimal heating and cooling solutions using cutting-edge, energy-efficient technology.
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