Muebles y enseres al servicio de la imagen: El teatro de la apariencia doméstica en la cataluña del 1700.

[spa] A partir de las tramas más públicas de la cotidianidad, así como de las prácticas más particulares de aquello público, la aristocracia catalana del siglo XVIII perfiló como el resto de Europa nuevas maneras de mostrarse y presentarse al mundo. La creación de una máscara lujosa tuvo en la ornamentación de las arquitecturas habitadas el marco adecuado para construir una escenografía perfecta. Arquitecturas particulares, percibidas siempre como espacios ocupados en constante evolución, como reflejo de personalidades, gustos y modas de una época determinada, como escenarios poliédricos de acciones, deberes, deseos y funciones, en definitiva como "obra compuesta". Imágenes de ornato y atrezzo, donde vestir el cuerpo, descubrir los tempos en el ejercicio de las relaciones y pasearse por los espacios amueblados configuran los verdaderos vertebradores de una correcta geografía del habitar. [eng] Building on the most public aspects of daily life, as well as on the most private practices in the public arena, the 18th-century catalan aristocracy, like that of the rest of Europe, shaped new ways of showing itself and presenting itself to the world. The creation of a lavish masque had in the arrangement of inhabited architectures the ideal circumstances to build a perfect stage set. Private architectures, always perceived as constantly-evolving occupied spaces, as a reflection of the personalities, tastes and fashions of a particular period, as multifaceted scenarios for actions, duties, desires and functions: in short a ―composed work‖. Images of ornato and atrezzo, where dressing the body, discovering tempos in the exercise of relations and strolling through furnished spaces are the backbone of an accomplished geography of inhabitation

Espais viscuts en la Catalunya moderna. La casa i el mobiliari.

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Resource, recycling and waste challenges for storage resources in a 100% renewable economy

In this thesis, the battery storage needed for a 100% renewable economy was calculated. It was determined that the use of batteries as a worldwide energy storage solution is not viable. Other systems, such as power-to-gas, would undoubtedly be a better match, as they are much less resource-intense, and they could be combined with the existing natural gas infrastructure for lowered costs. Data was gathered for two regions that would be studied in detail. These regions were (1) Germany, Austria and Luxemburg, and (2) California. An in-depth analysis of the load and renewable generation (from solar and wind) profiles was done, which was used to calculate the amount of battery storage that would be needed in the area, as well as the requirements that an electrolyzer should be able to meet. Data was also gathered for the world, which enabled a study about consumption, generation and current renewable capacity, among others. Solar irradiation and wind maps were used to estimate the potential of each of the renewable sources studied to provide energy in the scenario of a 100% renewable economy. A theoretical approach about electrolyzer technologies, batteries and practical aspects of hydrogen as a gas fuel can also be found in the thesis. The available data for the two regions studied, along with the results of their storage calculations, was used to calculate the fraction of energy that was provided by each of the renewable sources studied. With this information, an equation was obtained and used to calculate the storage needed for other regions in the world if their approximate renewable potential (fraction) and consumption were known. The estimated total energy storage for the world was then calculated considering each of the continents and was found to be a total of 19,981 TWh (100% roundtrip efficiency – ideal battery). Since the average energy density of batteries is known, it is estimated that this amount of storage would require a 133,205 Mt battery, and since the estimated composition of lithium-ion batteries is also known, it was calculated that to build such an amount of storage would be quite resource-intense: 3,143.64 Mt of lithium and 25,815.13 Mt of cobalt. If the reader takes into consideration that the lithium and cobalt reserves are estimated to be about 53 Mt and 145 Mt, respectively, it is easy to see that the calculated amounts required for the battery are, by far, too large to be executed. Due to the low cost of extracted lithium, the fraction of the metal used today that comes from recycling is scaringly close to zero. Most of the recycling processes for lithium are currently only at research stage, and the majority of them combine physical (battery dismantlement and crushing, along with physical separation of compounds) and chemical processes (leaching, extractions, precipitations), the latter being the ones that have traditionally been used in the mine industry to extract metals (hydrometallurgy). They use harsh chemicals that can be cleaned and reused, and finally sent to a dedicated treatment plant as it is done in the chemical industry. These results were obtained by means of gathering and analyzing data on energy consumption and generation profiles, and considering renewable capacities for solar and wind, in the case of the specific regions; considering information on global and continental-based energy consumption and generation amounts, and renewable potentials for the worldwide estimations; and studying the composition and characteristics of the lithium-ion batteries used today, along with the available critical metals reserves, to calculate the amounts of resources that would be needed to fabricate the calculated energy storage devices.Outgoin

L’ofici de fuster a la Barcelona del set-cents. Noves aportacions documentals, noves mirades

L’aproximació a l’ofici de fuster i la seva evolució com a art mecànica ha estat sempre realitzada en funció de l’artefacte resultant i bàsicament cenyint-se en la construcció de mobiliari. L’atenció per l’evolució estilística del mobiliari ha relegat a un segon terme l’interès per l’entramat d’accions i circumstàncies que configuraven l’activitat laboral en el món de les fusteries, tot menyspreant, fins i tot, l’apropament a unes altres produccions i activitats afins a dit ofici. En el present article, hi proposem una panoràmica que abordi la complexitat de la fusteria al llarg del segle XVIII a Barcelona, mostrant-ne i defensant-ne facetes fins ara poc conegudes. Es tracta de marcar un mapa que ens apropi a la diversitat de tallers existents, tot desgranant-ne els aspectes particulars més rellevants: la formació dels mestres fusters, la producció o fins i tot els plets amb altres gremis. I és en aquesta realitat on pretenem emmarcar i donar a conèixer per primera vegada el disseny de mobles emprats en l’agençament dels interiors benestants barcelonins. Ho farem a partir de l’anàlisi de les traces inèdites incloses, com a prova per intentar establir les competències professionals de cada un, en el llarg i destacat plet civil entre fusters i escultors que va tenir lloc a les darreries del segle XVIII.Discussions of the carpenter’s trade and its evolution as a mechanical art have always revolved around the resulting artefact, centring, basically, on the construction of furniture. This emphasis on the stylistic evolution of furniture has relegated as a secondary consideration all interest in the weave of actions and circumstances that characterised working activity in the world of carpentry, to the point, even of eschewing all study of other activities and products with affinities to the trade. This article proposes a more general overview of the complexities of the carpentry trade in Barcelona in the 18th century, providing details about little-known aspects. The aim is to draw a map on which appear all the different workshops that existed in those times, whilst focusing on certain particularly important questions: how master carpenters were trained, what was produced and even disputes with other guilds. And it is within this framework, for the first time, that we seek to discuss the design of furniture used to decorate the homes of wealthy Barcelona families. Our analysis will be based on drawings of this furniture, seen here for the first time, in order to establish the professional fields of all those involved in the long, resounding civil dispute that took place between carpenters and sculptors towards the end of the 18th century

Scheduling strategies for time-sensitive distributed applications on edge computing

Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that shifts the computation capabilities close to the data sources. This new paradigm, coupled with the use of parallel embedded processor architectures, is becoming a very promising solution for time-sensitive distributed applications used in Internet of Things and large Cyber-Physical Systems (e.g., those used in smart cities) to alleviate the pressure on centralized solutions. However, the distribution and heterogeneity nature of the edge computing complicates the response-time analysis on these type of applications. This thesis addresses this challenge by proposing a new Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-task based system model to characterize: (1) the distribution nature of applications executed on the edge; and (2) the heterogeneous computation and network communication capabilities of edge computing platforms. Based on this system model, this work presents five different scheduling strategies: four sub-optimal but tractable heuristics and an optimal but costly approach based on a mixed integer linear programming (MILP), that minimize the overall response time of distributed time-sensitive applications. To address both issues, and as a proof of concept, we use COMPSs, a framework composed of a task-based programming model and a runtime used to program and efficiently distribute time-sensitive applications across the compute continuum. However, COMPSs is agnostic of time-sensitive applications, hence in this work we extend it to consider the dynamic scheduling based on the proposed scheduling strategies. Our results show that our scheduling heuristics outperform current scheduling solutions, while providing an average and upper-bound execution time comparable to the optimal one provided by the MILP allocation approach