A Comment on Griffin et al “My Quest, an Intervention Using Text Messaging to Improve Dietary and Physical Activity Behaviors and Promote Weight Loss in Low-Income Women”

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The scop of an air source heat pump: Comparison between on-off and inverter heat pump

The paper investigates the seasonal performance of electric air-to-water heat pump comparing an on-off heat pump with an inverter-driven variable speed compressor. Reference is made to a heat pump for domestic space heating installed in Bologna, and the bin-method proposed by UNI/TS 11300-4 is employed in order to investigate the effect of external temperature. The analysis shows that the inverter heat pump performs better than the on-off one, displaying higher values of SCOP about at least 10%

Lifestyle at Time of COVID-19: How Could Quarantine Affect Cardiovascular Risk

COVID-19 is causing a global pandemic with a high number of deaths and infected people. To contain the diffusion of COVID-19 virus, governments have enforced restrictions on outdoor activities or even collective quarantine on the population. Quarantine carries some long-term effects on cardiovascular disease, mainly related to unhealthy lifestyle and anxiety

Replacement of gas boilers with air source heat pumps: An economic analysis based on a trnsys evaluation and on the actual energy prices in Italy

In this work, we investigate the replacement of a gas boiler with an electric air-to-water heat pump (AWHP) as a heating generation system for a detached single-family house. Attention is paid to the recent increase in energy prices in Italy. The evaluation of the energy consumption is done via a dynamic analysis performed by employing Trnsys. The investment results are economically advantageous only if the thermal energy demand is quite high, and the recent energy price increase (for both natural gas and electricity) leads to disadvantages in replacing the heat generation system in all the considered cases

Hourly data for evaluating the carbon dioxide emission factor of heat pumps or other devices connected to the Italian grid

This data article includes an elaboration of carbon dioxide data available from three different online sources in the years from 2016 to 2019. The data article refers to the paper “Interpolating functions for CO2 emission factors in dynamic simulations: the special case of a heat pump” by the same authors. The data are provided on an hourly basis and are useful to determine the carbon dioxide emission of an electric heat pump or other devices connected to the Italian grid. The importance of the provided data is related to the possibility of having an accurate estimation of the CO2 emission when the device works for only a limited period of time during the year or day. Moreover, since the given data are provided in electronic format (.txt file or .xlsx spreadsheet) they are very useful to perform dynamic simulation using self-made or commercial software such as Trnsys, Energy Plus etc

A Long-Term Dynamic Analysis of Heat Pumps Coupled to Ground Heated by Solar Collectors

In agreement with the decarbonization of the building sector to meet the 2050 climate neutrality targets, borehole thermal storage for solar energy represents a potential solution to increase the energy efficiency of renewable energy plants. As is well known, electricity is not the optimum solution to integrate large inflows of fluctuating renewable energy. In the present paper, we investigate the possibility to use the solar collector to give energy to the borehole field. In detail, a solar-assisted geothermal heat pump is applied to a school located in Milan, Italy. In winter, both the energy from the solar collector and the heat pump are collected into a storage tank connected to the emission terminals, whereas, in summer, as there is no energy demand, the hot water from the solar collector flows into the geothermal probes. By means of this seasonal thermal energy storage technology, the intermittent solar energy collected and stored during the summer months can be utilized during the winter months when the heating demand is high. A long-term dynamic analysis is performed by employing Trnsys. The results show that solar collectors coupled with ground-source heat pumps can give an important contribution to the soil temperature drift, and this also applies in cases of un-balanced loads during the heating season. Moreover, the employment of solar collectors increases the seasonal coefficient of performance of the heat pumps and may rise to reductions to the probes field

Influence of different heating systems on thermal comfort perception: a dynamic and CFD analysis

In this paper, we investigate the influence of different heating systems on the thermal comfort indexes, Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) and Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (PPD), for a residential apartment located in Bologna (Italy). The apartment has an area of 40 m2 and is located on the ground floor of 4 floors building. The envelop consists in horizontal perforated bricks with internal thermal insulation material and two windows. The analyses are performed employing Trnsys, a commercial dynamic simulation software and Simcenter STAR-CCM+, a multiphysics computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The CFD analysis regards a steady condition of a typical winter day in Bologna. Thermal comfort indexes and thermal energy demand are studied comparing two different heating generation systems existing in the considered apartment: a condensing gas boiler coupled with radiators as terminal emitters and an air-to-air heat pump. By crossing the results obtained by the dynamical approach and by the CFD simulations, a two-objective methodology where energy consumption is minimised while thermal comfort is obtained, is presented

Infrared nanospectroscopy of individual extracellular microvesicles

Extracellular vesicles are membrane-delimited structures, involved in several inter-cellular communication processes, both physiological and pathological, since they deliver complex biological cargo. Extracellular vesicles have been identified as possible biomarkers of several pathological diseases; thus, their characterization is fundamental in order to gain a deep understanding of their function and of the related processes. Traditional approaches for the characterization of the molecular content of the vesicles require a large quantity of sample, thereby providing an average molecular profile, while their heterogeneity is typically probed by non-optical microscopies that, however, lack the chemical sensitivity to provide information of the molecular cargo. Here, we perform a study of individual microvesicles, a subclass of extracellular vesicles generated by the outward budding of the plasma membrane, released by two cultures of glial cells under different stimuli, by applying a state-of-the-art infrared nanospectroscopy technique based on the coupling of an atomic force microscope and a pulsed laser, which combines the label-free chemical sensitivity of infrared spectroscopy with the nanometric resolution of atomic force microscopy. By correlating topographic, mechanical and spectroscopic information of individual microvesicles, we identified two main populations in both families of vesicles released by the two cell cultures. Subtle differences in terms of nucleic acid content among the two families of vesicles have been found by performing a fitting procedure of the main nucleic acid vibrational peaks in the 1000–1250 cm-1 frequency range

Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study

Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely on aprioristic assumptions. By reconstructing the three-dimensional position of individual birds in airborne flocks of few thousands members, we prove that the interaction does not depend on the metric distance, as most current models and theories assume, but rather on the topological distance. In fact, we discover that each bird interacts on average with a fixed number of neighbours (six-seven), rather than with all neighbours within a fixed metric distance. We argue that a topological interaction is indispensable to maintain flock's cohesion against the large density changes caused by external perturbations, typically predation. We support this hypothesis by numerical simulations, showing that a topological interaction grants significantly higher cohesion of the aggregation compared to a standard metric one.Comment: To be submitted to PNAS - 25 page