Previous editorials for Ingeniería e Investigación volume 33 have dealt with some aspects related to what the journal should be, taking it to be not just a means of communicating the research work being done by Universidad Nacional de Colombia professors and students but also a training/educational tool which can be used for promoting their written communication skills.
Even though most articles were written by authors who were members of our university when the journal began to be published, diversification regarding the origin of material has been observed during the past few years. For example, bearing the first two issues of this volume in mind, about 60% of the articles were written by authors from educational or research institutions which were not just the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. This extremely positive aspect, when regarded from the point of view of the indicators defined by Colciencias for classifying national journals, could have arisen from different causes and may be broken-down in several ways, leaving the matter open to our readers’ opinion. The authors’ diversification, regarding both their institution and country of origin, enrich the journal as a means of scientific communication and its increasingly improved positioning in the classification of indexed journals. However, this slightly modifies its role as an educational/training tool.
The Universidad Nacional de Colombia’s Editorial/Publications’ Board has presented a set of actions to the academic community during the last year aimed at strengthening its function. Such action was intended to strengthen the function of the editorial committees, making them responsible for defining each faculty’s editorial policy. The journals must become an integral part of such policy and, therefore, their communicative and training function must be analysed and, if considered appropriate, redefined.
The current issue, the third in volume 33, includes thirteen articles from the journal’s different target areas. Two of them address environmental impact, in spite of dealing with such different topics as hydraulic-sedimentological management of the Canal del Dique and ball mill dosage involved in producing cement. Regarding the Canal del Dique, the authors present aspects related to a systemic evaluation of the environmental impact of six alternatives for the canal’s hydraulic-sedimentological management. The article dealing with ball mill dosage composition, as used in the cement industry, shows its influence on energy consumption and determines potential energy saving, such saving leading to reduced operating costs and CO2 emission. Another article study aspects related to photovoltaic energy.
Three articles present the results of evaluating different materials, thereby confirming this area’s past, present and future importance in the development of engineering. The first is a review article which presents some equations enabling the surface properties of fruit to be calculated. One of the others studies the influence of pH and adding a corrosion inhibitor on the electrochemical properties of hybrid films applied to galvanised steel, whilst the other deals with synthesis conditions for producing LTA zeolite. A further two articles present supply chain research results; one analyses supply chain risk by using system dynamics and the other presents a methodology for identifying and evaluating an industrial installation’s localisation factors and provides an example from the Colombian biofuel sector.
The other articles deal with topics such as using acoustic equations for detecting tapered roller bearing faults, experimental software for designing products in small- and medium-sized companies, evaluating Green’s function for following-up seismic records for dynamic testing, stability of slender columns on an elastic foundation and modelling aspect-oriented software.
I sincerely hope that the articles in this issue will be of interest to all our readers and will feed argument-based discussion of the results presented in them. As on previous occasions, I would like to invite members of the academic community comprised by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia’s Engineering Faculty to express their opinion about this issue of the journal through the means deemed most convenient, but especially using the journal’s e-mail at: revii_bog@unal.edu.co
Ing. Paulo César Narváez Rincón
Associate Professor – Chemical and Environmental Department - Engineering Faculty
Director – Ingeniería e Investigación Journal
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá