Development of the glass slumping technology for the production of teh X-raymirrors aboard the international X-ray observatory optical module.

missin

Beyond the Wall: Towards the Discovery of the Psychiatric Hospital of Collemaggio

The research is the first scientific study about the ex psychiatric hospital in Collemaggio (AQ). It is related to some photographic plates regarding patients that were recovered in the asylum. Photography was an important instrument for the psychiatrists: they used it to study mental health through photos of patients’ bodies and faces. The photographic plates are compared to the experiments of Charcot, the innovations of Diamond and the psychiatric analysis of Lombroso

A wide field X-ray telescope for astronomical survey purposes: from theory to practice

X-ray mirrors are usually built in the Wolter I (paraboloid-hyperboloid) configuration. This design exhibits no spherical aberration on-axis but suffers from field curvature, coma and astigmatism, therefore the angular resolution degrades rapidly with increasing off-axis angles. Different mirror designs exist in which the primary and secondary mirror profiles are expanded as a power series in order to increase the angular resolution at large off-axis positions, at the expanses of the on-axis performances. Here we present the design and global trade off study of an X-ray mirror systems based on polynomial optics in view of the Wide Field X-ray Telescope (WFXT) mission. WFXT aims at performing an extended cosmological survey in the soft X-ray band with unprecedented flux sensitivity. To achieve these goals the angular resolution required for the mission is very demanding ~5 arcsec mean resolution across a 1-deg field of view. In addition an effective area of 5-9000 cm^2 at 1 keV is needed.Comment: Accepted for publication in the MNRAS (11pages, 3 table, 13 figures

Vulnerability assessment and seismic retrofit of an industrial steel structure

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of a silo structure belonging to the ILVA steel industrial plant in Taranto (Italy) and to study an eventual operation of seismic retrofit. The case study is composed of two identical Silos and, considering the low stiffness of the connecting elements, only one has been studied in this thesis. The Silos is used for storing hydrated lime, that is produced in particular furnaces and then is distributed and utilized for two main purposes: (1) to remove the phosphor from “pig iron” in blast furnaces, and (2) to remove the sulphur from liquid steel in a steel plant. Firstly, an analysis of the available information on the silo is made, such as technical drawings. Secondly, the seismic response of the structure is studied through non-linear static analysis (pushover -N2 method-) with using the OpenSees software. At the end, a seismic improvement is studied by using Torsional Bracing System of dissipator and the final result is compared with the initial structure. The results highlight an increase of the general resistance of the system and, also, an improvement for the maintenance of the bracing system. In fact, in case of seismic event, the steel cylinder of the Torsional Bracing System is the only one element that is damaged, while, on the other hand, in a structure without a retrofit system, it is necessary to replace the total bracing system, resulting in a significantly more expensive and time consuming intervention

Development of the glass slumping technology for the production of teh X-raymirrors aboard the international X-ray observatory optical module.

missin

Phase-field simulation of ductile fracture in shell structures

In this paper, a computational framework for simulating ductile fracture in multipatch shell structures is presented. A ductile fracture phase-field model at finite strains is combined with an isogeometric Kirchhoff-Love shell formulation. For the application to complex structures, we employ a penalty approach for imposing, at patch interfaces, displacement and rotational continuity and C0 and C1 continuity of the phase-field, the latter required if a higher-order phase-field formulation is adopted. We study the mesh dependency of the numerical model and we show that mesh refinement allows for capturing important features of ductile fracture such as cracking along shear bands. Therefore, we investigate the effectiveness of a predictor-corrector algorithm for adaptive mesh refinement based on LR NURBS. Thanks to the adoption of time- and space-adaptivity strategies, it is possible to simulate the failure of complex structures with a reasonable computational effort. Finally, we compare the predictions of the numerical model with experimental results