New underground laboratories: Europe, Asia and the Americas

Deep underground laboratories provide the low radioactive background environment necessary to explore the highest energy scales that cannot be reached with accelerators, by searching for extremely rare phenomena. In addition, these laboratories provide unique opportunities to sectors of other fields: geodynamics, rock mechanics, hydrology and the study of life under extreme conditions. Underground laboratories of different size and depth exist in all the regions. This article is focussed on future perspectives, reviewing the newer facilities, those still under project and the space becoming available at the older laboratories. We shall not discuss the existing or proposed facilities dedicated to detectors of long base line experiment with reactor or accelerator beams

Analisi comparativa di un circuito low pressure e high pressure EGR per un motore diesel sottostante a normativa americana US LEV III ULEV 125

Questa tesi di laurea nasce dall’esperienza maturata presso la VM Motori S.p.A., ufficio CRM (Centro Ricerca Motori) di ingegneria, divisione del reparto R&D (Research and Development) situato a Cento di Ferrara. Durante tale esperienza sono state affrontate le problematiche inerenti al settore automotive riguardo la ricerca e lo sviluppo dei motori endotermici diesel. Dopo un approccio introduttivo, che definisce l’ambito lavorativo in cui opera VM Motori S.p.A. e l’oggetto della tesi, si passa alla definizione ed alla calibrazione di un circuito low pressure EGR di un propulsore diesel da 200HP@3800rpm di potenza e 500Nm@1600rpm di coppia per uso automobilistico, mediante l’ausilio dei software AδαMO, INCA, Controldesk Next Generation, DoE, DIAdem ed INDICOM, software per lo studio della calibrazione al banco sviluppo. Si analizzano gli aspetti che contraddistinguono la VM Motori S.p.A. dalle altre aziende specializzate nel settore automotive, facendo riferimento ai campi produttivi in cui si applica l’ingegneria meccanica ed analizzandone gli aspetti tecnici, metodici e gestionali. Da notare il ruolo fondamentale delle automotive nell’economia mondiale in riferimento alla produzione dei principali propulsori diesel, primarie fonti produttive della VM

Optimization of electric vehicles charging station deployment by means of evolutionary algorithms

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LCA to start and perform green public procurement for funeral products

AMNU S.p.A. is an Italian multi-utility company, whose owner are local municipalities, which operates basically in the territory of the Province of Trento in urban waste collection and transport. In the last years AMNU has started the “new” activity of funeral service that has a wide public concern and is a source of deep connection with the the territory. Funeral services and cemetery\u27s management are becoming more and more important and therefore AMNU has moved forward in the environmental path and this is the objective of this work: to integrate procurement tenders for the funeral products industry by inserting environmental purchasing criteria. To achieve this, we have performed a LCA study, because it has scientific and legal bases, focusing on sector of inhumation. The aim is to determine criteria that may characterize funerary products from an environmental point of view. Moreover, AMNU is related to the GPP (= Green Public Procurement) which is an instrument of european environmental policy and aims to encourage the market for green products and services, starting from the public administration. It is important to note that the GPP is no longer a voluntary instrument in Italy and that the cost of procurement of goods and services in Italy, operated by different Public Authorities (PA), each year is around 50 billion euro (ISTAT data): PA can push towards a more green economy and a more sustainable market. To propose an invitation to tender for the first time characterized by green criteria for funeral products, an environmental assessment has been performed for the use of three types of products: 1) coffin, 2) padding, 3) absorbent pad which is often added between the coffin and the padding to absorb the body fluids of the deceased. THE RESULTS 1) The LCA study helped to identify nine criteria (5 applied to the first product and 4 to the other two) that have allowed to identify and choose products that provide the best environmental impact. 2) Furthermore, the assessment based on the Carbon Footprint has provided interesting directions: in the case of the first product, the difference between the best possible product and the worst is about 40 times of CO2eq. while it is much smaller, with a maximum difference of impact of about 4 times, if referred to the other two products. So, in an LCA perspective, it is more important to focus on coffin rather than padding or absorbent pad. 3) The tender has been compiled with the new requirements and it has been published and now it is available to suppliers (totale value: more than 200.000 euro) who have to contend with these new criteria for the next delivery; consider that the part of the technical bid means 60% of the contract notice and environmental section is the more important

THE LEAN SIX SIGMAAPPROACH FOR PROCESS IMPROVEMENT: A CASE STUDY IN A HIGH QUALITY TUSCANY WINERY

This paper describes the application of a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project to a winemaking process in a high-quality, Italian winery. LSS is used to focus on the problem through a quantitative analysis of waste and quality performances. The LSS basic algorithm (called “DMAIC”) helps to detect and quantify critical aspects of the process for transferring liquid used in the cellar. The improvement solution is developed and applied through the modification of the cellar system and the process procedure. The results obtained with this solution are shown and discussed in this paper, so too the long term reliability of the improved process analyzed. The results obtained by this case study can help to understand the importance of the LSS method to drive the improvement of agricultural and agrofood productions also in terms of environmental impact which is strongly connected to waste reduction

Sub-nanomolar detection of biogenic amines by SERS effect induced by hairy Janus silver nanoparticles

Surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is largely used as a transduction method for analytes detection in liquid and vapor phase. In particular, SERS effect was promoted by a plethora of different metal and semiconducting nanoparticles (NPs) and silver and gold nanoparticles appear particularly suitable for this application. Nevertheless, silver nanoparticles intrinsic propensity to aggregate in large clusters reduces the possibility to use naked nanoparticles in SERS applications, for this reason they are usually functionalized with organic molecules. This approach inhibits the aggregation process but, on the other hand, reduces the surficial area of the NPs able to interact with the analyte molecules. In the present work, we propose a simple method to obtain surficial anisotropic Janus silver nanoparticles: octadecylamine was used to stabilize the nanoparticles and to promote the deposition of the silver nanoparticles on a solid substrate. The AgNPs/octadecylamine nanostructures showed the typical “hairy” Janus morphology and a strong SERS effect was observed when two biogenic amines, i. e. 2-phenylethylamine and tyramine, were fluxed on the solid film. SERS phenomenon was studied as a function both of the chemical structure of the fluxed amine and of the distance between the aromatic moiety and the nanoparticle allowing to propose the AgNPs/octadecylamine Janus nanoparticles as an active layer for the detection of phenylethylamine and tyramine in picomolar concentration

Airline delays, congestion internalization and non-price spillover effects of low cost carrier entry

This paper develops an econometric model of flight delays to investigate the influence of competition and dominance on the incentives of carriers to maintain on-time performance. We consider both the route and the airport levels to inspect the local and global effects of competition, with a unifying framework to test the hypotheses of 1. airport congestion internalization and 2. the market competition-quality relationship in a single econometric model. In particular, we examine the impacts of the entry of low cost carriers (LCC) on the flight delays of incumbent full service carriers in the Brazilian airline industry. The main results indicate a highly significant effect of airport congestion self-internalization in parallel with route-level quality competition. Additionally, the potential competition caused by LCC presence provokes a global effect that suggests the existence of non-price spillovers of the LCC entry to non-entered routes

Using formal methods to develop WS-BPEL applications

In recent years, WS-BPEL has become a de facto standard language for orchestration of Web Services. However, there are still some well-known difficulties that make programming in WS-BPEL a tricky task. In this paper, we firstly point out major loose points of the WS-BPEL specification by means of many examples, some of which are also exploited to test and compare the behaviour of three of the most known freely available WS-BPEL engines. We show that, as a matter of fact, these engines implement different semantics, which undermines portability of WS-BPEL programs over different platforms. Then we introduce Blite, a prototypical orchestration language equipped with a formal operational semantics, which is closely inspired by, but simpler than, WS-BPEL. Indeed, Blite is designed around some of WS-BPEL distinctive features like partner links, process termination, message correlation, long-running business transactions and compensation handlers. Finally, we present BliteC, a software tool supporting a rapid and easy development of WS-BPEL applications via translation of service orchestrations written in Blite into executable WS-BPEL programs. We illustrate our approach by means of a running example borrowed from the official specification of WS-BPEL