Technical analysis of a renewable woody biomass generator/electrolyzer poly-generative system

In the REPowerEU plan, the European Commission has envisaged a rapid reduction in dependence on fossil fuels, an acceleration of the green transition and has shown its willingness to tackle the climate crisis by resorting to greater and better use of renewable energy sources. Furthermore, from 2035 the “Fit for 55” climate package aims to reduce emissions of pollutants and climate-altering gas emissions and to encourage the diffusion of new pure electric or fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles. In this context, this article deals with a poly-generative energy system for the production of H2, electric and thermal powers. It is able to satisfy the new vehicles needs and/or the electric/thermal loads of a rural building located in Rende (Italy, Lat. 39.3°N) on two typical winter and summer days. The poly-generative system is mainly composed of an energy system fed by woody biomass in a cogenerative arrangement, a photovoltaic system and a PEM electrolyzer. Technical analysis of the system shows that for the mixed fleet of 30 vehicles the output electrical and thermal powers and hydrogen production are respectively of about 50 kW, 97 kW and 9.23 kg. Furthermore, the system covers totally the electric load on summer days and the thermal load for hot water production in the summer and winter days

High Rate of Hypothyroidism in Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis Patients Co-Infected with HIV in Mumbai, India.

Adverse events (AEs) among HIV-infected patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) receiving anti-TB and antiretroviral treatments (ART) are under-researched and underreported. Hypothyroidism is a common AE associated with ethionamide, p-aminosalicylic acid (PAS), and stavudine. The aim of this study was to determine the frequency of and risk factors associated with hypothyroidism in HIV/MDR-TB co-infected patients

First Direct Observation of Collider Neutrinos with FASER at the LHC

We report the first direct observation of neutrino interactions at a particle collider experiment. Neutrino candidate events are identified in a 13.6 TeV center-of-mass energy $pp$ collision data set of 35.4 fb${}^{-1}$ using the active electronic components of the FASER detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The candidates are required to have a track propagating through the entire length of the FASER detector and be consistent with a muon neutrino charged-current interaction. We infer $153^{+12}_{-13}$ neutrino interactions with a significance of 16 standard deviations above the background-only hypothesis. These events are consistent with the characteristics expected from neutrino interactions in terms of secondary particle production and spatial distribution, and they imply the observation of both neutrinos and anti-neutrinos with an incident neutrino energy of significantly above 200 GeV.Comment: Submitted to PRL on March 24 202

First neutrino interaction candidates at the LHC

FASER$\nu$ at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to directly detect collider neutrinos for the first time and study their cross sections at TeV energies, where no such measurements currently exist. In 2018, a pilot detector employing emulsion films was installed in the far-forward region of ATLAS, 480 m from the interaction point, and collected 12.2 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. We describe the analysis of this pilot run data and the observation of the first neutrino interaction candidates at the LHC. This milestone paves the way for high-energy neutrino measurements at current and future colliders.Comment: Auxiliary materials are available at https://faser.web.cern.ch/fasernu-first-neutrino-interaction-candidate

The FASER Detector

FASER, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, is an experiment dedicated to searching for light, extremely weakly-interacting particles at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Such particles may be produced in the very forward direction of the LHC's high-energy collisions and then decay to visible particles inside the FASER detector, which is placed 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point, aligned with the beam collisions axis. FASER also includes a sub-detector, FASER$\nu$, designed to detect neutrinos produced in the LHC collisions and to study their properties. In this paper, each component of the FASER detector is described in detail, as well as the installation of the experiment system and its commissioning using cosmic-rays collected in September 2021 and during the LHC pilot beam test carried out in October 2021. FASER will start taking LHC collision data in 2022, and will run throughout LHC Run 3

Technical analysis of a renewable woody biomass generator/electrolyzer poly-generative system

In the REPowerEU plan, the European Commission has envisaged a rapid reduction in dependence on fossil fuels, an acceleration of the green transition and has shown its willingness to tackle the climate crisis by resorting to greater and better use of renewable energy sources. Furthermore, from 2035 the “Fit for 55” climate package aims to reduce emissions of pollutants and climate-altering gas emissions and to encourage the diffusion of new pure electric or fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles. In this context, this article deals with a poly-generative energy system for the production of H2, electric and thermal powers. It is able to satisfy the new vehicles needs and/or the electric/thermal loads of a rural building located in Rende (Italy, Lat. 39.3°N) on two typical winter and summer days. The poly-generative system is mainly composed of an energy system fed by woody biomass in a cogenerative arrangement, a photovoltaic system and a PEM electrolyzer. Technical analysis of the system shows that for the mixed fleet of 30 vehicles the output electrical and thermal powers and hydrogen production are respectively of about 50 kW, 97 kW and 9.23 kg. Furthermore, the system covers totally the electric load on summer days and the thermal load for hot water production in the summer and winter days

Synthesis, identification and quantification of oligomers from polyester coatings for metal packaging

Polyester can coatings protect both food and packaging from mutual contamination. Even though, can coatings may release Non-Intentionally Added Substances (NIAS) in addition to Intentionally Added Substances (IAS). As NIAS are mainly constituted by cyclic or linear side products that are formed during the polymerization process, we focused our attention on these oligomeric species of molecular weight <1000 Da. These oligomers were obtained from two different polyester resins, each synthesized from four monomers (two phthalic acids and two diols), and from the corresponding final enamel can coatings using ethanol at 95% and 50% at 60 degrees C for 4 h and 10 days, respectively, as food simulants. HPLC-ESI-MS analysis on the extracts allowed identifying various cyclic and linear oligomers. For the conclusive identification of the different oligomers and their isomeric structures, ad hoc standards were synthesized by acylation reaction between alkyl diols and phthaloyl chlorides. By comparison of H-1 NMR spectra, linear and cyclic oligomers were characterized by finding the major presence of 2 + 2 cyclic compounds. The 16 synthesized standards, 4 linear and 12 cyclic compounds were used to establish a method for quantification of linear and cyclic oligomers in enamel migration samples by micro HPLC-high-resolution MS (HRMS). The results showed no significant differences between the amounts of cyclic oligomers extracted with both ethanol concentrations (50 and 95%) and time contact. The extracts showed only a small amount of linear compounds and a prevalence of 2 + 2 cyclic oligomers. The work shows the great importance of the synthesis of specific standards to allow exact quantification in food contact material migrate

Lung ultrasound in COVID-19: clinical correlates and comparison with chest computed tomography

Lung ultrasound (LUS) and chest computed tomography (chest CT) are largely employed to evaluate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia. We investigated semi-quantitative LUS and CT scoring in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. LUS and chest CT were performed within 24 h upon admission. Both were analyzed according to semi-quantitative scoring systems. Subgroups were identified according to median LUS score. Patients within higher LUS score group were older (79 vs 60 years, p&lt;0.001), had higher C-reactive protein (CRP) (7.2 mg/dl vs 1.3 mg/dl, p&lt;0.001) and chest CT score (10 vs 4, p=0.027) as well as lower PaO2/FiO2 (286 vs 356, p=0.029) as compared to patients within lower scores. We found a significant correlation between scores (r=0.390, p=0.023). Both LUS and CT scores correlated directly with patients age (r=0.586, p&lt;0.001 and r=0.399, p=0.021 respectively) and CRP (r=0.472, p=0.002 and r=0.518, p=0.002 respectively), inversely with PaO2/FiO2 (r=-0.485, p=0.003 and r=-0.440, p=0.017 respectively). LUS score only showed significant correlation with hs-troponin T, NT-pro-BNP, and creatinine (r=0.433, p=0.019; r=0.411, p=0.027, and r=0.497, p=0.001, respectively). Semi-quantitative bedside LUS is related to the severity of COVID-19 pneumonia similarly to chest CT. Correlation of LUS score with markers of cardiac and renal injury suggests that LUS might contribute to a more comprehensive evaluation of this heterogeneous population

Coronavirus disease 2019 in patients with cardiovascular disease. clinical features and implications on cardiac biomarkers assessment

Previous cardiovascular disease (CVD) and myocardial involvement are common in coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). We investigated relationships between CVD, cardiac biomarkers and outcome in COVID-19