Electrical capacitance probe characterisation for vertical annular air-water flow investigation

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.The experimental analysis and the qualification of an Electrical Capacitance Probe (ECP), for the void fraction measurement, is presented. The ECP, developed at the SIET, is used to investigate a vertical air/water flow, characterized by high void fraction. Mass flow rates have been analyzed between 0.094 and 0.15 kg/s for air and between 0.002 and 0.021 kg/s for water, corresponding to void fraction up to 90% and to annular and wavy-annular flow patterns. The ECP signals are used to obtain the geometrical shape functions (signals as a function of electrode distances) in single and two phase flows. The dependence of the signal by the void fraction is derived and other flow characteristics as the liquid film thickness and the phase velocities are evaluated by means of rather simple models. The experimental analysis allows to characterize the ECP, showing the advantages and the drawbacks of this technique for the two-phase flow characterization at high void fraction, and it provides a reliable tool for the selection of the instrumentation for the SIET Company SPES3 facility.dc201

VET students into technology companies: a microlearning digital course to train critical thinking skills

This microlearning course is designed to support VET graduates or students, especially those with fewer opportunities, who join a technology company at the beginning of their professional career. It has been developed within the framework of the Erasmus + project “VET STUDENTS İNTO TECHNOLOGY COMPANİES: A VET students mobility network in the technological sector through a virtual environment with specific materials for critical thinking”. This is an intiative co-financed by the Erasmus + Programme, with a personalized digital course format, to take into account both the previous training of the VET student or graduate and the type of company they will join. The course has in its sights to develop in the VET student the specific competences required by the technology company to address the problems typical of fields of leading technology innovation, as well as fitting in multidisciplinary teams. To do this, this course generates an innovative methodology in which the education itinerary is built based on previous knowledge of the student and the needs and work field of the technology company. Besides its contents strengthen critical thinking as an essential mechanism for work in both dynamic and technology sectors. For that purpose, the student is asked a series of questions in the form of problems that, in addition to being related to the study plans of VET studies, require for their solution the search for information, its analysis and many times the making of a decision or adopting a personal position on it. We aim with our training projects, within the Erasmus + program, to convince students that they are capable of going further and further in the development of their professional skills being the technology sector an acceptable option for them, making their work increasingly valuable for their inclusion, for their own personal development, for that of the company in which they work and for society. But for this certain skills are required, and one of the most important is learning to learn autonomously and to accurately analyse the information received and the decisions that are made from it. It is generally true that the problems that one encounters in professional practice are not going to be the ones that you were taught in your VET studies. Vocational training has to head for equipping students with the necessary tools to face the new problems that they will face in their job and to grow professionally every day. We intend to show how valuable critical thinking skills are in analysing our way of thinking and making decisions. In this paper we present examples of the exercises included in the course, how their approach and the processes that have led to a solution relate with the standards of critical thinking and the different levels of help that are offered to the student for their solution. The course is accessible from a digital educational software “ON YOUR SIDE: VIRTUAL ASSISTANT FOR EUROPEAN MOBILITIES IN TECHNOLOGICAL CENTERS” developed in the framework of this Erasmus+ project in order to develop cooperative work between students with fewer opportunities doing their internships in technology companies and their inclusion in new job posts. We will also present this software in a very summarized way in this article.This work has been funded by the Erasmus + program within the 2019-1-ES01-KA202-064569 project, Spanish Service for the Internationalization of Education (SEPIE

Transition Towards a Green Economy in Europe: Innovation and Knowledge Integration in the Renewable Energy Sector

This paper investigates the fragmentation of the EU innovation system in the field of renewable energy sources (RES) by estimating the intensity and direction of knowledge spillovers over the years 1985-2010. We modify the original double exponential knowledge diffusion model proposed by Caballero and Jaffe (1993) to provide information on the degree of integration of EU countries’ RES knowledge bases and to assess how citation patterns changed over time. We show that EU RES inventors have increasingly built “on the shoulders of the other EU giants”, intensifying their citations to other member countries and decreasing those to domestic inventors. Furthermore, the EU strengthened its position as source of RES knowledge for the US. Finally, we show that this pattern is peculiar to RES, with other traditional (i.e. fossil-based) energy technologies and other radically new technologies behaving differently. We provide suggestive, but convincing evidence that such decrease in fragmentation around the turn of the century emerged as a result of the EU increased support for RES taking mainly the form of demand-pull policies

The ALICE Zero Degree Calorimeters

In the ALICE experiment at Cern LHC, a set of hadron calorimeters will be used to determine the centrality of the Pb-Pb collision. The spectator protons and neutrons, will be separated from the ion beams, using the separator magnet (D1) of the LHC beam optics and respectively detected by a proton (ZP) and a neutron (ZN) "Zero-degree Calorimeter" (ZDC). The detectors will be placed in front of the separator D2 magnet, 115 meters away from the beam intersection point. The ZDCs are quartz-fiber spaghetti calorimeters that exploit the Cherenkov light produced by the shower particles in silica optical fibers.This technique offers the advantages of high radiation hardness (up to several Grad), fast response and reduced lateral dimension of the detectable shower. In addition, quartz-fiber calorimeters are intrinsically insensitive to radio-activation background, which produces particles below the Cherenkov threshold.The ALICE ZDC should have an energy resolution comparable with the intrinsic energy fluctuations, which range from about 20 0.000000or central events to about 5 0.000000or peripheral ones, according to simulations that use HIJING as event generator. The fiber-to-absorber filling ratio must be chosen as a good compromise between the required energy resolution and the fiber cost.The design of the proposed calorimeter will be discussed, together with the expected performances. Whenever possible, the simulated results will be compared with the experimental ones, obtained with the built prototypes and with the NA50 ZDC, which can be considered as a working prototype for the ALICE neutron calorimeter

Clinical global impression-severity score as a reliable measure for routine evaluation of remission in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders

Aims: This study aimed to compare the performance of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) symptom severity criteria established by the Remission in Schizophrenia Working Group (RSWG) with criteria based on Clinical Global Impression (CGI) severity score. The 6-month duration criterion was not taken into consideration. Methods: A convenience sample of 112 chronic psychotic outpatients was examined. Symptomatic remission was evaluated according to RSWG severity criterion and to a severity criterion indicated by the overall score obtained at CGI-Schizophrenia (CGI-SCH) rating scale (≤3) (CGI-S). Results: Clinical remission rates of 50% and 49.1%, respectively, were given by RSWG and CGI-S, with a significant level of agreement between the two criteria in identifying remitted and non-remitted cases. Mean scores at CGI-SCH and PANSS scales were significantly higher among remitters, independent of the remission criteria adopted. Measures of cognitive functioning were largely independent of clinical remission evaluated according to both RSWG and CGI-S. When applying RSWG and CGI-S criteria, the rates of overall good functioning yielded by Personal and Social Performance scale (PSP) were 32.1% and 32.7%, respectively, while the mean scores at PSP scale differed significantly between remitted and non-remitted patients, independent of criteria adopted. The proportion of patients judged to be in a state of well-being on Social Well-Being Under Neuroleptics-Short Version scale (SWN-K) were, respectively, 66.1% and 74.5% among remitters according to RSWG and CGI-S; the mean scores at the SWN scale were significantly higher only among remitters according to CGI-S criteria. Conclusions: CGI severity criteria may represent a valid and user-friendly alternative for use in identifying patients in remission, particularly in routine clinical practic

Environmental regulation induced foreign direct investment

The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between environmental regulations and international capital flows. However, empirical studies have so far failed to find conclusive evidence for this so-called pollution haven or race to the bottom effect where foreign direct investment (FDI) is assumed to be attracted to low regulation countries, regions or states. In this paper we present a simple theoretical framework to demonstrate that greater stringency in environmental standards can lead to a strategic increase in capital inflows which we refer to as environmental regulation induced FDI. Our result reveals a possible explanation for the mixed results in the empirical literature and provides an illustration of the conditions under which environmental regulations in the host country can affect the location decision of foreign firms