Solar energy technologies in sustainable energy action plans of italian big cities

Cities, accounting for more than 3/4 of global final energy consumption, are equipping themselves with governance tools to improve energy efficiency. In Europe, urban energy policy has adopted, only recently and voluntarily, the Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAP), following the European Strategy 20-20-20. Italy, country most sensitive among European ones, accounts for 53% of SEAPs signatories. In order to evaluate how urban energy system in Italy can match sustainability European goals, it is necessary to analyse the technological options promoted by the energy policies for the urban environment. The paper presents the state-of-art of Urban Energy Planning in Italy, focusing on the implementation of Solar Energy technologies, and their role in new urban energy strategy instruments, i.e. SEAP, to promote renewables deployment. Carbon emission avoidance interventions planned by Italian big cities were analysed, highlighting the chosen Solar Energy technology. The aim of this paper is to discuss and evaluate the differences of solar energy harvesting in Italian urban scenarios, taking into account geographical and morphological constraints, and to compare the forecasts for 2020 and 2030scenarios, in accordance with European and National laws in force

Innovative Use of Hydrogen in Energy Retrofitting of Listed Buildings

Existing buildings represent the major challenge in energy efficiency strategies applied to the building stock. Moreover, architectural and landscaping constraints related to listed buildings are further limitations to possible interventions. When listed buildings are used as museum, achieving the same effectiveness level of typical energy efficiency measures is very difficult and, if possible, very expensive. In order to couple preservation of cultural heritage and CO2 emission reduction, the approach would move to energy supply rather than modifications in building envelope or installation of new HVAC components. So, this study focuses on the opportunity to green NG supply of existing heating systems by means of Power to Gas option at district level. Thus, the recent advancements in Hydrogen enriched Natural Gas produced by RES electricity excess offer a zero-impact strategy to decarbonize the listed buildings using existing energy infrastructures. At the same time, the absence of changes in building features and the introduction of a renewable share in the supply address the sustainability issues of cultural heritage. In conclusion, a first original attempt was made towards the future crucial task of museum's deep energy refurbishment

MoMo: a group mobility model for future generation mobile wireless networks

Existing group mobility models were not designed to meet the requirements for accurate simulation of current and future short distance wireless networks scenarios, that need, in particular, accurate, up-to-date informa- tion on the position of each node in the network, combined with a simple and flexible approach to group mobility modeling. A new model for group mobility in wireless networks, named MoMo, is proposed in this paper, based on the combination of a memory-based individual mobility model with a flexible group behavior model. MoMo is capable of accurately describing all mobility scenarios, from individual mobility, in which nodes move inde- pendently one from the other, to tight group mobility, where mobility patterns of different nodes are strictly correlated. A new set of intrinsic properties for a mobility model is proposed and adopted in the analysis and comparison of MoMo with existing models. Next, MoMo is compared with existing group mobility models in a typical 5G network scenario, in which a set of mobile nodes cooperate in the realization of a distributed MIMO link. Results show that MoMo leads to accurate, robust and flexible modeling of mobility of groups of nodes in discrete event simulators, making it suitable for the performance evaluation of networking protocols and resource allocation algorithms in the wide range of network scenarios expected to characterize 5G networks.Comment: 25 pages, 17 figure

Spectral Efficiency of Random Time-Hopping CDMA

Traditionally paired with impulsive communications, Time-Hopping CDMA (TH-CDMA) is a multiple access technique that separates users in time by coding their transmissions into pulses occupying a subset of $N_\mathsf{s}$ chips out of the total $N$ included in a symbol period, in contrast with traditional Direct-Sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA) where $N_\mathsf{s}=N$. This work analyzes TH-CDMA with random spreading, by determining whether peculiar theoretical limits are identifiable, with both optimal and sub-optimal receiver structures, in particular in the archetypal case of sparse spreading, that is, $N_\mathsf{s}=1$. Results indicate that TH-CDMA has a fundamentally different behavior than DS-CDMA, where the crucial role played by energy concentration, typical of time-hopping, directly relates with its intrinsic "uneven" use of degrees of freedom.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figure

Consonant gemination in Italian: the affricate and fricative case

Consonant gemination in Italian affricates and fricatives was investigated, completing the overall study of gemination of Italian consonants. Results of the analysis of other consonant categories, i.e. stops, nasals, and liquids, showed that closure duration for stops and consonant duration for nasals and liquids, form the most salient acoustic cues to gemination. Frequency and energy domain parameters were not significantly affected by gemination in a systematic way for all consonant classes. Results on fricatives and affricates confirmed the above findings, i.e., that the primary acoustic correlate of gemination is durational in nature and corresponds to a lengthened consonant duration for fricative geminates and a lengthened closure duration for affricate geminates. An inverse correlation between consonant and pre-consonant vowel durations was present for both consonant categories, and also for both singleton and geminate word sets when considered separately. This effect was reinforced for combined sets, confirming the hypothesis that a durational compensation between different phonemes may serve to preserve rhythmical structures. Classification tests of single vs. geminate consonants using the durational acoustic cues as classification parameters confirmed their validity, and highlighted peculiarities of the two consonant classes. In particular, a relatively poor classification performance was observed for affricates, which led to refining the analysis by considering dental vs. non-dental affricates in two different sets. Results support the hypothesis that dental affricates, in Italian, may not appear in intervocalic position as singletons but only in their geminate form.Comment: Submitted to Speech Communication. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2005.0696