The weld line is an inevitable defect in the most injection molded components. It is a zone with reduced mechanical properties negatively influencing on the molding behavior in exploitation. The effect of: melt temperature, holding pressure and time, injection velocity and cooling time on the weld line tensile strength is analyzed in this paper. The material of the moldings was high density polyethylene (HDPE). The results showed that the holding pressure, injection velocity, melt temperature and cooling time have significant influence on tensile strength.

Although it is primarily grown as food, corn also represents a very good raw material for the production of biogas due to the favourable starch and fibre ratio that is the basis of its structure. In addition, an important fact is that there are large arable or potentially arable areas in our country that are triturated with different pollutants, so that the production of plant crops for dietary purposes on these surfaces is not possible. The aim of this paper was to determine the biometric potential of various varieties of corn grain in laboratory conditions through a series of experimental measurements. The obtained results are based on the assessment of the possibility of applying energy plantations of corn grown on contaminated arable or recultivated surfaces in the production of biogas.

Since banks and insurance companies are financial institutions dealing with risks in vari - ous aspects of their business, it is important to make a general approach to the issue of risk and risk management from the perspective of these institutions. In that regard, we made a short overview of the risks these institutions are faced to as well as the methods they use for risk assessments. In order to limit our research to specific financial markets, we provided the basic characteristics of bank and insurance markets of Southeastern Europe (SEE), presenting the core indicators of development level of these markets and their legal and institutional environment related to new regulation proposed in Europe. We analyzed the level of implementation of Basel and Solvency risk assessment stan - dards in these countries and tried to anticipate direction(s) where these markets are going to move in the coming period.

Abstract The objective of this research is to show an innovative way for processing the collected data and measurement of practice and performances of supply chain by means of transformation of the obtained linguistic values, using the appropriate fuzzy methods, into crisp values of research variable dimensions. The methodology was applied for the measurement of the influence of an independent supply chain practice variable on the dependent supply chain performance variable and the research included the food industry companies. In order to apply the multivariate analysis methods, it is necessary to have the dimensions of the variable, but not the claims. Fuzzy logic enables the weighting of each claim and determining its weight, and determining the research variable dimension value in order to be able to use the multivariate analysis methods. The use of this methodology enables realistic evaluation of the dimensions and the results obtained show a statistically significant influence proving to be suitable for further testing using various statistical methods. The hypotheses about the relationships between supply chain practices and supply chain performances are confirmed.