Study of the vegetation series of Cuenca de Pamplona-Valdizarbe (Navarre-NE Spain): interest of their mapping and application

Se estudian las series y subseries de vegetación de 77.817 ha del centro de Navarra, para su cartografía a escala 1:25.000. Las series y subseries son indicadoras de las características ecológicas del territorio y complementan la información climática disponible. Se han descrito ocho series de vegetación, dos geoseries y dos complejos de vegetación. Las series climatófilas comprenden 28 faciaciones, reconocidas mediante las comunidades vegetales que las integran. La distinción de las faciaciones no sólo está asociada a factores climáticos, sino también a factores geomorfológicos, litológicos, edáficos e históricos. Estos últimos factores permiten reconocer patrones complejos a escalas de detalle, superpuestos a los que reflejan los factores climáticos, evidentes a escalas más reducidas. El estudio se enmarca en un proyecto que pretende definir la potencialidad del territorio para diferentes usos y elaborar modelos de evaluación de tierras en Navarra utilizando las unidades cartográficas reconocidas.The vegetation series and subseries of 77,817 ha of Central Navarre are studied to be used as mapping units of a vegetation series map at scale 1:25,000. The series and subseries are indicators of the land environmental features and may be useful to complete the available climatic data. Eight vegetation series, two geoseries and two vegetation complexes have been described. Climatophilous series include 28 subseries defined by the different plant communities that form each one. While vegetation series show clearly climatic patterns when studied at small scales, at detailed scales the vegetation patterns show also the effects of landforms, lithology, soils and history. This study is part of a project that is intended to assess land suitability for different uses and to work out land evaluation models in Navarre based upon the recognized mapping units

Real energy payback time and carbon footprint of a GCPVS

Grid connected PV systems, or GCPVS, produce clean and renewable energy through the photovoltaic e ect in the operation stage of the power plant. However, this is the penultimate stage of the facilities before its dismantlement. Before starting generating electricity with zero CO2 emissions, a negative energy balance exists mainly because of the embodied energy costs of the PV components manufacturing, transport and late dismantlement. First, a review of existing studies about energy life cycle assessment (LCA) and Carbon Footprint of PV systems has been carried out in this paper. Then, a new method to evaluate the Real Energy Payback Time (REPBT), which includes power looses due to PV panels degradation is proposed and di erences with traditional Energy Payback Time are analysed. Finally, a typical PV grid connected plant (100 kW nominal power) located in Northern Spain is studied in these sustainability terms. This facility has been firstly completely modelled, including PV modules, inverters, structures and wiring. It has been also considerated the energy involved in the replacement of those components with shorter lifespan. The PV panels degradation has been analysed through the comparison of normalised flash test reports on a significant sample of the installed modules before and 5 years after installation. Results show that real PV degradation a ect significantly to the Energy Payback Time of the installation increasing slightly a 4:2% more the EPBT value for the case study. However, along a lifespan of 30 years, the GCPVS under analysis will return only 5:6 times the inverted energy on components manufacturing, transport and installation, rather than the expected 9:1 times with the classical estimation

New device for the simultaneous measurement of diffuse solar irradiance on several azimuth and tilting angles

A device is proposed for the measurement of diffuse solar irradiance on tilted surfaces pointing-to as well as fixed on the equatorial direction. Most commercial devices are not designed for this purpose. Here, we present a specific design for a system based on a single multi-lobe shadow-ring that allows us to measure diffuse irradiance with several tilted pyranometers – from 60 to 90 degrees from the horizontal plane – and on different azimuth angles. This first prototype allows us to measure in the four cardinal directions. The ring is designed to minimize the covered celestial dome observed by each sensor. Moreover, the complete device needs a very small installation area and its simplicity means it is inexpensive and easy to operate. The measurements have subsequently to be corrected with a geometrical correction factor that takes into account the portion of the sky vault blocked by the shadow-ring. These measurements are essential for estimating solar potential on tilted surfaces – such as building façades – and for improving current anisotropic solar models, among many other applications.Spanish Government (grant ENE2011-27511

Experimental analysis of a novel PV/T panel with PCM and heat pipes

A new design for the use of photovoltaic and thermal (PV/T) technology with thermal storage is reported in this work. In the new design, a phase change material (PCM) tank is added to the backside of the photovoltaic panel. The advantages of this design are the storage of thermal energy and the efficiency improvement of the photovoltaic (PV) panel as a result of the temperature control of the PV cell during the phase change process. In addition, a perimeter with a black surface surrounds the PV panel to increase the absorption of thermal energy. The thermal energy is then transferred to the backside of the PCM tank by heat pipes. One prototype with lauric acid as PCM was tested under two different operating configurations and resulted in an overall daily efficiency of 50% coulding be improve by controlling the PCM temperature during the day.Regional Government of Castilla y León, Spain (Ref. BU034U16) and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities under the I+D+i state program “Challenges Research Projects” (Ref. RTI2018-098900-B-I00

Mobile clinical decision support systems and applications: a literature and commercial review

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-0004-y[EN] Background: The latest advances in eHealth and mHealth have propitiated the rapidly creation and expansion of mobile applications for health care. One of these types of applications are the clinical decision support systems, which nowadays are being implemented in mobile apps to facilitate the access to health care professionals in their daily clinical decisions. Objective: The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to make a review of the current systems available in the literature and in commercial stores. Secondly, to analyze a sample of applications in order to obtain some conclusions and recommendations. Methods: Two reviews have been done: a literature review on Scopus, IEEE Xplore, Web of Knowledge and PubMed and a commercial review on Google play and the App Store. Five applications from each review have been selected to develop an in-depth analysis and to obtain more information about the mobile clinical decision support systems. Results: 92 relevant papers and 192 commercial apps were found. 44 papers were focused only on mobile clinical decision support systems. 171 apps were available on Google play and 21 on the App Store. The apps are designed for general medicine and 37 different specialties, with some features common in all of them despite of the different medical fields objective. Conclusions: The number of mobile clinical decision support applications and their inclusion in clinical practices has risen in the last years. However, developers must be careful with their interface or the easiness of use, which can impoverish the experience of the users.This research has been partially supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain. This research has been partially supported by the ICT-248765 EU-FP7 Project. This research has been partially supported by the IPT-2011-1126-900000 project under the INNPACTO 2011 program, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.Martínez Pérez, B.; De La Torre Diez, I.; López Coronado, M.; Sainz De Abajo, B.; Robles Viejo, M.; García Gómez, JM. (2014). Mobile clinical decision support systems and applications: a literature and commercial review. Journal of Medical Systems. 38(1):1-10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-0004-yS110381Van De Belt, T. H., Engelen, L. J., Berben, S. A., and Schoonhoven, L., Definition of Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: A systematic review. J Med Internet Res 2010:12(2), 2012.Oh, H., Rizo, C., Enkin, M., and Jadad, A., What is eHealth (3): A systematic review of published definitions. J Med Internet Res 7(1):1, 2005. PMID: 15829471.World Health Organization (2011) mHealth: New horizons for health through mobile technologies: Based on the findings of the second global survey on eHealth (Global Observatory for eHealth Series, Volume 3). 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Matern Child Health J 16(5):1092–1101, 2012.Martínez-Pérez, B., de la Torre-Díez, I., López-Coronado, M., and Herreros-González, J., Mobile Apps in Cardiology: Review. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 1(2):e15, 2013.de Wit HA, Mestres Gonzalvo C, Hurkens KP, Mulder WJ, Janknegt R, et al., Development of a computer system to support medication reviews in nursing homes. Int J Clin Pharm. 26, 2013.Dahlström, O., Thyberg, I., Hass, U., Skogh, T., and Timpka, T., Designing a decision support system for existing clinical organizational structures: Considerations from a rheumatology clinic. J Med Syst 30(5):325–31, 2006.Lambin P, Roelofs E, Reymen B, Velazquez ER, Buijsen J, et al., ‘Rapid learning health care in oncology’ - An approach towards decision support systems enabling customised radiotherapy’. Radiother Oncol. 27, 2013.Graham, T. A., Bullard, M. J., Kushniruk, A. W., Holroyd, B. R., and Rowe, B. H., Assessing the sensibility of two clinical decision support systems. J Med Syst 32(5):361–8, 2008.Martínez-Pérez, B., de la Torre-Díez, I., and López-Coronado, M., Mobile health applications for the most prevalent conditions by the World Health Organization: Review and analysis. J Med Internet Res 15(6):e120, 2013.Savel, T. G., Lee, B. A., Ledbetter, G., Brown, S., LaValley, D., et al., PTT advisor: A CDC-supported initiative to develop a mobile clinical laboratory decision support application for the iOS platform. Online J Public Health Inform 5(2):215, 2013.Doctor Doctor Inc. (2009) iDoc. iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/es/app/idoc/id328354734?mt=8 . Accessed 13 September 2013.Hardyman, W., Bullock, A., Brown, A., Carter-Ingram, S., and Stacey, M., Mobile technology supporting trainee doctors’ workplace learning and patient care: An evaluation. BMC Med Educ 13:6, 2013.Lee, N. J., Chen, E. S., Currie, L. M., Donovan, M., Hall, E. K., et al., The effect of a mobile clinical decision support system on the diagnosis of obesity and overweight in acute and primary care encounters. ANS Adv Nurs Sci 32(3):211–21, 2009.Divall, P., Camosso-Stefinovic, J., and Baker, R., The use of personal digital assistants in clinical decision making by health care professionals: A systematic review. Health Informatics J 19(1):16–28, 2013.Chignell, M, and Yesha, Y, Lo, J., New methods for clinical decision support in hospitals. In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research (CASCON’10). Toronto, ON; Canada, 2010Charani, E., Kyratsis, Y., Lawson, W., Wickens, H., Brannigan, E. T., et al., An analysis of the development and implementation of a smartphone application for the delivery of antimicrobial prescribing policy: Lessons learnt. J Antimicrob Chemother 68(4):960–7, 2013.Klucken, J., Barth, J., Kugler, P., Schlachetzki, J., Henze, T., et al., Unbiased and mobile gait analysis detects motor impairment in Parkinson’s disease. PLoS One 8(2):e56956, 2013.Hervás, R., Fontecha, J., Ausín, D., Castanedo, F., Bravo, J., et al., Mobile monitoring and reasoning methods to prevent cardiovascular diseases. Sensors (Basel) 13(5):6524–41, 2013.Di Noia, T., Ostuni, V. C., Pesce, F., Binetti, G., Naso, N., et al., An end stage kidney disease predictor based on an artificial neural networks ensemble. Expert Syst Appl 40(11):4438–4445, 2013.Velikova, M., van Scheltinga, J. T., Lucas, P. J. F., and Spaanderman, M., Exploiting causal functional relationships in Bayesian network modelling for personalised healthcare. Int J Approx Reason, 2013. doi: 10.1016/j.ijar.2013.03.016 .Medical Data Solutions (2012) Pediatric clinical pathways. Google play. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ipathways . 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Hospital volume and outcomes for acute pulmonary embolism: Multinational population based cohort study

[Objectives] To evaluate the association between experience in the management of acute pulmonary embolism, reflected by hospital case volume, and mortality.[Design] Multinational population based cohort study using data from the Registro Informatizado de la Enfermedad TromboEmbólica (RIETE) registry between 1 January 2001 and 31 August 2018.[Setting] 353 hospitals in 16 countries.[Participants] 39 257 consecutive patients with confirmed diagnosis of acute symptomatic pulmonary embolism.[Main] outcome measure Pulmonary embolism related mortality within 30 days after diagnosis of the condition.[Results] Patients with acute symptomatic pulmonary embolism admitted to high volume hospitals (>40 pulmonary embolisms per year) had a higher burden of comorbidities. A significant inverse association was seen between annual hospital volume and pulmonary embolism related mortality. Admission to hospitals in the highest quarter (that is, >40 pulmonary embolisms per year) was associated with a 44% reduction in the adjusted odds of pulmonary embolism related mortality at 30 days compared with admission to hospitals in the lowest quarter (<15 pulmonary embolisms per year; adjusted risk 1.3% v 2.3%; adjusted odds ratio 0.56 (95% confidence interval 0.33 to 0.95); P=0.03). Results were consistent in all sensitivity analyses. All cause mortality at 30 days was not significantly reduced between the two quarters (adjusted odds ratio 0.78 (0.50 to 1.22); P=0.28). Survivors showed little change in the odds of recurrent venous thromboembolism (odds ratio 0.76 (0.49 to 1.19)) or major bleeding (1.07 (0.77 to 1.47)) between the low and high volume hospitals.[Conclusions] In patients with acute symptomatic pulmonary embolism, admission to high volume hospitals was associated with significant reductions in adjusted pulmonary embolism related mortality at 30 days. These findings could have implications for management strategies.Peer reviewe

An expert judgement approach to determine measures to remove institutional barriers and economic non-market failures that restrict photovoltaic self-consumption deployment in Spain

[EN] Despite the Spanish privileged geographical location and business leadership in the renewable energy field, currently is can be observed that the solar photovoltaic generation, electric self-consumption systems and net-metering policies deployment is much lower than it can be observed in other countries, even with lower energy sources for self-consumption. Energy policy experts assess as main reason the absence of a stable regulatory framework and the existence of clear disincentives. These disincentives are based on several economic non-market failures and institutional barriers. One key factor has proven to be the regulatory uncertainty created mainly by the recent national most relevant ministerial orders regarding energy generation and consumption, which suggests that, de facto, the regulatory framework is currently still under development. This paper includes first a brief but deep description of the prosumers penetration existing scenario in Spain, and then it focuses on feasible strategies to accelerate higher solar photovoltaic and self-consumption growth rates in Spain. Then, new policy measures to eliminate, or at least, mitigate, current barriers to their deployment are proposed and discussed. It is concluded that it results mandatory the urgent modernization of the energy regulatory framework promoting an active role for distributed PV generation which could have a significant positive impact in the voltage control and frequency regulation in distribution networks, among other advantages.[ES] A pesar de la privilegiada situación geográfica española y del liderazgo empresarial en el campo de las energías renovables, en la actualidad se observa que el despliegue de la generación solar fotovoltaica, de los sistemas de autoconsumo eléctrico y de las políticas de net-metering es muy inferior al que se observa en otros países, incluso con menores fuentes de energía para el autoconsumo. Los expertos en política energética valoran como razón principal la ausencia de un marco regulatorio estable y la existencia de claros desincentivos. Estos desincentivos se basan en varios fallos económicos ajenos al mercado y en barreras institucionales. Un factor clave ha resultado ser la incertidumbre regulatoria creada principalmente por las recientes órdenes ministeriales nacionales más relevantes en materia de generación y consumo de energía, lo que sugiere que, de facto, el marco regulador se encuentra actualmente en fase de desarrollo. Este trabajo incluye en primer lugar una breve pero profunda descripción del escenario de penetración de prosumidores existente en España, y a continuación se centra en las estrategias viables para acelerar mayores tasas de crecimiento de la energía solar fotovoltaica y el autoconsumo en España. A continuación, se proponen y discuten nuevas medidas políticas para eliminar, o al menos, mitigar, las barreras actuales a su despliegue. Se concluye que resulta obligatoria la urgente modernización del marco regulatorio energético promoviendo un papel activo para la generación fotovoltaica distribuida que podría tener un impacto positivo significativo en el control de la tensión y la regulación de la frecuencia en las redes de distribución.S

MaLECoN: un nuevo material híbrido laminado fibra-metal para construcción naval.

Existe la necesidad perentoria de nuevos materiales para construcción naval que sean capaces de satisfacerlos requerimientos de diseño y fabricación de estructuras más ligeras, a la vez que resistentes, que permitan velocidades de desplazamiento más elevadas y menores consumos energéticos. El acero presenta una serie de limitaciones que dificultan la mejora continuada en la línea marcada para la fabricación de estructuras ligeras, resistentes y seguras. Los materiales compuestos son livianos y resistentes, pero los sistemas de fabricación son costosos y precisan de más mano de obra especializada; por otra parte, son muy sensibles al daño por impacto y pueden presentar problemas de degradación de sus propiedades mecánicas debido a la absorción de agua. Los materiales híbridos laminados fibra-metal combinan la elevada resistencia al impacto y la durabilidad, junto a la versatilidad en los procesos productivos propios de los materiales metálicos, con la resistencia y rigidez específicas en la dirección de las fibras, así como un buen comportamiento a fatiga, característica de los materiales compuestos. El material híbrido multicapas está formado por láminas metálicas alternando con otras de material compuesto y de adhesivo estructural, consiguiéndose prestaciones en servicio mejoradas. Este material ha sido patentado en la Oficina Española de Patentes y Marcas, junto con su procedimiento de fabricación. La extensión internacional de la patente a más de treinta países ha sido ya presentada y está siguiendo el procedimiento de concesión