INNDAGA: an environmental data acquisition innovation platform

INNDAGA is a multipurpose platform for conducting oceanographic surveys in coastal areas developed on an 8.5 m long inflatable boat. This concept allows the vessel to operate safely and with great manoeuvring flexibility in areas where larger research vessels cannot access (rocky areas, port ...) at low operational cost. Is fully integrated in an information management system to providing efficiency and effectiveness of strategic decision making.Peer Reviewe

Development of an all-sky camera for short-term forecasting of photovoltaic generation

In photovoltaic solar generation, the intensity of solar radiation directly influences the power generated. The radiation is strongly affected by the presence of clouds, which modify it quickly and intermittently. In order to take control and management decisions for a photovoltaic installation, it would be desirable to have the ability of predicting the generation drop events. Among the different types of forecast available, the forecast using all-sky cameras is the only one capable of predicting the evolution of clouds based on local observation of the sky, allowing the events of the next few minutes to be anticipated. In this article we show the development of an all-sky camera prototype which covered both the design of the hardware and the procedure necessary to forecast the evolution of cloud cover, as well as its representation in software.Fil: Santisi, Sebastián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Centro de Simulación Computacional para Aplicaciones Tecnológicas; ArgentinaFil: Otero, Alejandro Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Centro de Simulación Computacional para Aplicaciones Tecnológicas; ArgentinaXIV Congreso Argentino de MeteorologíaBuenos AiresArgentinaCentro Argentino de Meteorólogo

Frequency shift on the potential-dependent surface-enhanced Raman scattering of pyridine: simplified models for metal and solvent effects

The electronic structure of adsorbates is altered when it interacts with a surface, modifying the properties of both entities and giving rise to interesting phenomena related to heterogeneous catalysis or molecular electronics. If such surface is a metallic substrate, the electrode potential can be used to tune this interaction. Potential-dependent Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) is a particularly useful technique to study the induced effects on the molecule when the metal-adsorbate surface complex is formed, as the observed frequency shifts of the vibrational modes can provide information about it. However, from the computational point of view, these systems are difficult to model, because the macroscopic metal cannot be modelled easily using quantum mechanics. As an approach, we propose a simple model using silver atomic wires with different size and charge bonded to the molecule (AgnPyq, n = 2,3,5,7 and q = 0 and ±1 for n even and odd, respectively) which has been developed by the group and provides a good description of the effect of the electrode potential on the chemical enhancement mechanism of SERS.1-3 Electronic calculations were performed using Density Functional Theory (DFT). In order to study the frequency shifts, solvent effects have been taken into account by using the Polarizable Continuum Model (PCM). We have used three different functionals (B3LYP, PW91 and M06HF) and two basis sets (LANL2DZ for all atoms and LANL2DZ for Ag and 6-31G(d) for C,N,H) and, in all cases, a good agreement is achieved in terms of amplitude and trend of the frequency shift for most of the vibrational modes, especially when solvent interactions are included. The method was extended to other metals and solvents giving results in agreement with the available experimental data.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Use of CALPUFF to predict airborne Mn levels at schools in an urban area impacted by a nearby manganese alloy plant

Children are susceptible to the health effects derived from elevated manganese (Mn) environmental exposure; residents living in urban areas where ferromanganese alloy plants are located are usually exposed to high Mn levels. In this work, a dispersion model developed by the USEPA, CALPUFF, has been used to estimate the airborne Mn levels near educational centers located in Santander bay, Northern Spain, an urban area where high Mn levels have been measured in the last decade. The CALPUFF model was validated in a previous work from a multi-site one-year observation dataset. Air manganese levels in 96 primary, secondary and high schools located in Santander bay were estimated using the CALPUFF model for two months corresponding to warm and cold periods using real meteorological data and Mn emission rates corresponding to different emission scenarios. Results show that when the emission scenario that best represented the observations dataset is used, the air Mn levels exceed the WHO guideline (i.e. 150?ng?Mn/m3) in 24% and 11% of the studied schools in the cold and warm periods respectively. These exceedances depend on the distance from the FeMn alloy plant and the direction of the prevailing winds. Additional emission scenarios based on the implementation of preventive and corrective measures are simulated and analysed in terms of the number of exceedances of the WHO guideline. The age range of children has been also considered in the analysis.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) through the CTM2013-43904R Project. This funding source was not involved in the study design; data collection, analysis, or interpretation; the writing of the article; or the decision to submit for publication

Charge Transfer mechanism in the Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering of 2,2'-bipyridine recorded on a silver electrode

Nowadays, Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) has become a powerful technique to investigate the electronic structure of surface-molecule hybrid systems due to the huge enhancement of the Raman signal. It is established that the origin of this enhancement has two main contributions; the electromagnetic (EM), related to surface plasmons, and the chemical mechanism, due to resonant charge transfer (CT) processes between the adsorbate and the metal. With the aim to investigate the SERS-CT of bipyridine and to identify charge transfer process, the spectra were recorded on silver electrode by using three different wavelengths (473, 532 and 785 nm) in a range from 0.0 up to -1.4 V electrode potential. The electrode potential was modelled in the calculations with atomic silver wires of different size and charge attached to the BPy molecule (AgnBPyq, with q = 0 for n = 2 and q = ±1 for n = 3, 5, 7) and were computed with Density Functional Theory (DFT). Although BPy shows a trans conformation in solution, a cis conformation was chosen for its chelating properties. The results indicate that the intensification of the ~1550 cm-1 band at negative potentials is due the Franck-Condon factors related to the resonant CT process from the metal to the BPy molecule.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Building High-Quality Datasets for Information Retrieval Evaluation at a Reduced Cost

[Abstract] Information Retrieval is not any more exclusively about document ranking. Continuously new tasks are proposed on this and sibling fields. With this proliferation of tasks, it becomes crucial to have a cheap way of constructing test collections to evaluate the new developments. Building test collections is time and resource consuming: it requires time to obtain the documents, to define the user needs and it requires the assessors to judge a lot of documents. To reduce the latest, pooling strategies aim to decrease the assessment effort by presenting to the assessors a sample of documents in the corpus with the maximum number of relevant documents in it. In this paper, we propose the preliminary design of different techniques to easily and cheapily build high-quality test collections without the need of having participants systems.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades; RTI2018-093336-B-C22Xunta de Galicia; GPC ED431B 2019/03Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/0

An MS-CASPT2 Study of the Photodecomposition of 4- Methoxyphenyl Azide. Role of Internal Conversion and Intersystem Crossing

Aryl azides photochemistry is strongly dependent on the substituent relative position, as has been studied by time resolved resonant Raman (TR3) spectroscopy for 4-methoxyphenyl azide and its isomer 3-methoxyphenyl azide. When irradiated at 266 nm, the former results in 4,4’-dimethoxyazobenzene whereas the latter forms 1,2-didehydroazepine. It is proposed that the key step of the reactions is the formation of a nitrene derivative. Recently, it has been proposed by us that nitrenes might have a relevant role in the Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) of p-aminothiophenol, however, the molecular mechanism is not well known in neither of these cases. Therefore, we studied the photodecomposition of 4-methoxyphenyl azide using multiconfigurational self-consistent field methods (MC-SCF) with the CAS-SCF and MS-CASPT2 approximations and calculated the resonant Raman spectra of the relevant species using a multi-state version of Albrecht’s vibronic theory. The results propose that the reaction follows a two steps sequence after irradiation at 266 nm: an intersystem crossing 21A’/23A’’ which decays through a 21A’/21A’’ conical intersection producing molecular nitrogen and triplet 4-methoxyphenyl nitrene in its ground state.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

On a conjecture about Higgs bundles for rank 2 and some inequalities

We briefly review an open conjecture about Higgs bundles that are semistable with after pulling back to any curve, and prove it in the rank 2 case. We also prove a set of inequalities holding for H-nef Higgs bundles that generalize some of the Fulton-Lazarsfeld inequalities for numerically effective vector bundles.Comment: 13 pages. v2: 14 pages. Some results have been strengthened and the exposition has been reorganized. v3: minor changes, final version to appear in Mediterranean J. Mat