Building for a Zero Carbon future: Trade-off between carbon dioxide emissions and primary energy approaches

Growing urbanization is driving urban policy makers to adopt sustainable practices aimed to limit the environmental impact of buildings which are responsible for an estimated 36% of climate-changing gas emissions in European cities. In order to meet the ambitious emission reduction targets set by the EU it is essential to develop policy for CO2 emissions saving. This work investigates the regulations of European countries that introduce carbon compliance requirement as implementation of the EPBD such as UK, Ireland, Austria and some Eastern European countries. With reference to the typical consumption pattern of an Italian home, the paper analyses the current limits of primary energy, RES requirements and CO2 emissions, investigating the relations between EPnren and carbon dioxide emissions levels

Medical treatment of early stage and rare histological variants of epithelial ovarian cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer is often considered a single pathological entity, but increasing evidence suggests that it is rather a group of different neoplasms, each with unique pathological characteristics, molecular features, and clinical behaviours. This heterogeneity accounts for the different sensitivity to antineoplastic drugs and makes the treatment of ovarian tumours a challenge. For early-stage disease, as well as for heavily pre-treated patients with recurrent ovarian cancer, the benefit of chemotherapy remains uncertain. Clear-cell, mucinous, low-grade serous, and endometrioid carcinomas show different molecular characteristics, which require different therapeutic approaches. In the era of personalised cancer medicine, understanding the pathogenesis and the genetic background of each subtype of epithelial ovarian tumour may lead to a tailored therapy, maximising the benefits of specific treatments and possibly reducing the side effects. Furthermore, personal factors, such as the patient’s performance status, should be taken into account in the management of ovarian cancer, with the aim of safeguarding the patients’ quality of life

Cooperation of unmanned systems for agricultural applications: A case study in a vineyard

Fully-autonomous vehicles, both aerial and ground, could provide great benefits in the Agriculture 4.0 framework when operating within cooperative architectures, thanks to their ability to tackle difficult tasks, particularly within complex irregular and unstructured scenarios such as vineyards on sloped terrains. A decentralised multi-phase approach has been proposed as an alternative to more common cooperative schemes. When perennial crops are considered, it is advantageous to build a simplified geometrical (and georeferenced) crops model, which can be identified by using 3D point clouds acquired during apriori explorative missions by unmanned aerial vehicles. This model can be used to plan the tasks to be performed within the crops by the in-field aerial and ground drones. In this companion paper, the proposed strategy is applied to a specific case study involving a vineyard on a sloped terrain, located in the Barolo region in Piedmont, Italy. Ad-hoc technologies and guidance, navigation and control algorithms were designed and implemented. The main objectives were to improve the autonomous driving capabilities of the drones involved and to automate the process of retrieving low-complexity maps from the data collected with preliminary remote sensing missions to make them available for the autonomous navigation by a quadrotor and an unmanned 4-wheel steering ground vehicle within the vine rows. Preliminary results highlight the benefits achievable by exploiting the tailored technologies selected and applied to improve each of the analysed mission phases

Energy use for climate control of animal houses: The state of the art in europe

Animal rearing is done into houses where heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting are adopted to control the indoor climate, however there are not reference values for the energy performance of such enclosures. In this paper, a first analysis on the energy use for climate control of animal houses that can be found in the technical and scientific literature is done for broilers, hens and pig houses, deriving reference energy use values that may be used for the benchmarking of the performance of these buildings

Case studies in food freezing at very low temperature

Freezing is one of the most widely used and effective processes to preserve foods shelf-life during long periods of time. This paper focuses on very low temperature freezing, and a thermal model, based on literature formulations, was developed to calculate the food freezing time considering several kinds of food, with different sizes, shapes and chemical composition. Moreover, once evaluated the food freezing time as a function of temperature and velocity of the cooling fluid, a chart reporting the food production rate, the freezing time and the cooling capacity was developed to properly design the freezing equipment in terms of optimal choice of the process and type of freezer

Performance assessment of a multi-energy system for a food industry

The energy saving is becoming an important topic also in the food industry. For this reason, it is important to use multi-energy systems to produce hot water for processes and space heating. The application considered in this paper, which concerns a chocolate factory, focuses on the hot water production through a multi-source storage tank. The water inside the tank is heated by four solar panels when there is enough solar radiation and by a gas back-up boiler. The cold aqueduct water, which it is going to be heated in the accumulator, is first preheated recovering waste heat from the condenser of the chiller. The system was equipped with an energy monitoring and recording device. The thermal model was used to analyse the hot water production system during the summer season considering the options of the heat recovery and of the solar thermal exploitation. The performance analysis was developed in order to establish energy savings that may be achieved

Performance assessment of a multi-energy system for a food industry

The energy saving is becoming an important topic also in the food industry. For this reason, it is important to use multi-energy systems to produce hot water for processes and space heating. The application considered in this paper, which concerns a chocolate factory, focuses on the hot water production through a multi-source storage tank. The water inside the tank is heated by four solar panels when there is enough solar radiation and by a gas back-up boiler. The cold aqueduct water, which it is going to be heated in the accumulator, is first preheated recovering waste heat from the condenser of the chiller. The system was equipped with an energy monitoring and recording device. The thermal model was used to analyse the hot water production system during the summer season considering the options of the heat recovery and of the solar thermal exploitation. The performance analysis was developed in order to establish energy savings that may be achieved