The Global Electroweak and Higgs Fits in the LHC era

We update the global fit to electroweak precision observables, including the effect of the latest measurements at hadron colliders of the $W$ and top-quark masses and the effective leptonic weak mixing angle. We comment on the impact of these measurements in terms of constraints on new physics. We also update the bounds derived from the fit to the Higgs-boson signal strengths, including the observables measured at the LHC Run 2, and compare the improvements with respect to the 7 and 8 TeV results.Comment: 5+1 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Prepared for the Proceedings of the 5th LHCP Conference -Shanghai, May 2017- and the EPS-HEP 2017 Conference -Venice, July 2017. (LHCP version.

Life Cycle Assessment in the automotive sector: a comparative case study of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and electric car

Abstract Transportation represents one of the major contributors to several environmental burdens such as Green-House-Gas (GHG) emissions and resource depletion. Considering the European Union, light duty vehicles are responsible for roughly 10% of total energy use and air emissions. As a consequence, the need for higher fuel/energy efficiency in both conventional and electric cars has become urgent and the efforts across industrial and research players have proposed a range of innovative solutions with great potential. This study presents a comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and electric vehicles. The analysis follows a "from cradle-to-grave" approach and it captures the whole Life-Cycle (LC) of the car subdivided into production, use and End-of-Life stages. The inventory is mainly based on primary data and the assessment takes into account a wide range of impact categories to both human and eco-system health. The eco-profile of the different vehicle configurations is assessed and the main environmental hotspots affecting conventional and electric cars are identified and critically discussed. The dependence of impacts on LC mileage is investigated for both propulsion technologies and the break-even point for the effective environmental convenience of electric car is determined considering several use phase electricity sources. The analysis is completed with a comparison of GHG emissions with the results of previous LCA studies

Lightweight Design Solutions in the Automotive Field: Environmental Modelling Based on Fuel Reduction Value Applied to Diesel Turbocharged Vehicles

A tailored model for the assessment of environmental benefits achievable by “light-weighting” in the automotive field is presented. The model is based on the Fuel Reduction Value (FRV) coefficient, which expresses the Fuel Consumption (FC) saving involved by a 100 kg mass reduction. The work is composed of two main sections: simulation and environmental modelling. Simulation modelling performs an in-depth calculation of weight-induced FC whose outcome is the FRV evaluated for a wide range of Diesel Turbocharged (DT) vehicle case studies. Environmental modelling converts fuel saving to impact reduction basing on the FRVs obtained by simulations. Results show that for the considered case studies, FRV is within the range 0.115–0.143 and 0.142–0.388 L/100 km × 100 kg, respectively, for mass reduction only and powertrain adaptation (secondary effects). The implementation of FRVs within the environmental modelling represents the added value of the research and makes the model a valuable tool for application to real case studies of automotive lightweight LCA