Il nuovo assetto della normativa di contrasto all'immigrazione clandestina tra giurisprudenza costituzionale, tutela dei diritti umani e integrazione europea

Il trattamento giuridico dello straniero irregolare è stato oggetto, in questi mesi, di diverse pronunce da parte della giurisprudenza interna e sovrastatale, che hanno posto in luce significativi contrasti tra la produzione legislativa e le elaborazioni pretorie. Tra gli interventi più incisivi, la sentenza n. 245/2011, con la quale la Corte Costituzionale ha annullato la norma del Codice Civile che vietava la celebrazione delle nozze a chi non fosse in possesso del permesso di soggiorno. L’intervento si colloca a pochi mesi di distanza da un’altra pronuncia di estremo rilievo, quella del 28 aprile 2011 sul caso El Dridi, con la quale la Corte di Giustizia dell’Unione Europea ha dichiarato non conforme alle Direttive comunitarie il reato di clandestinità. Infine, con sentenza del 23 febbraio 2012 sul caso Hirsi, la Corte europea dei diritti dell’uomo ha condannato l’Italia all’unanimità per la pratica dei c.d. respingimenti in mare

Charm and beauty reconstruction in ATLAS

The article describes the selection of samples of charm and beauty mesons, exclusively or semi-exclusively reconstructed on data collected in 2010. These samples have been used to calibrate the flavour tagging algorithms (through the selection of pure, or heavily enriched, b-jets samples) and for measurements of direct physical interest (b-hadrons production cross section)

Solutions for restoring and protecting the threatened seagrass Posidonia australis

Seagrasses create a critical habitat for diverse communities and support vital ecosystem functions and services in coastal environments. The installation of artificial structures and urbanisation are key drivers of ecological change in coastal environments, often fragmenting and altering natural habitats with cascading effects on local ecosystem services. Posidonia australis is a slow-growing seagrass, endemic to Australia, that forms extensive meadows in sheltered temperate estuaries which are popular areas for boating activities and aquaculture. P. australis in New South Wales is particularly susceptible to impacts derived from boating activities, including habitat damage from boat moorings, and from structures associated with aquaculture industries. In recent decades, major losses have been recorded, with poor rates of recovery leading to the Endangered listing of P. australis in some estuaries in New South Wales. Although alternative (i.e., more ‘environmentally friendly’) designs of boat moorings and oyster aquaculture have been developed with the aim to reduce impacts on seagrass, more research is needed to combine those methods with the legal protection of P. australis. In this thesis, I tested methods to restore and protect the threatened seagrass P. australis and quantified the relationships between the meadow structure and ecosystem functions. Initially, I developed an innovative restoration procedure to re-establish P. australis transplants within old boat mooring scars, using naturally-detached fragments collected from the shore by citizen scientists. In New South Wales, the options for obtaining material to restore P. australis are limited due to the low seed production and the protected and declining status of seagrass meadows that could provide donor material. Survival after one year was significantly greater for those planted in June (54 %) than in January (31 %) and many surviving fragments had produced new shoots. Collected fragments with less dead leaf tissue (necrosis) and with more (> 3) shoots were the most likely to survive. I then used field experiments to quantify how three of the most common oyster cultivation methods in NSW (trays, longline baskets and floating bags), which are commonly located over seagrass, affect P. australis. Trays and longline baskets significantly reduced the amount of light available to the seagrass, which in turn compromised P. australis photosynthetic efficiency leading to 4-fold declines in shoot density after only 3 months. Conversely, floating bags caused no decline in shoot density. Lastly, as differences in seagrass extent can have cascading effects on associated biodiversity, I used a seascape approach to measure whether ecosystem functions and processes vary based on the habitat complexity of P. australis meadows. I found that faunal communities, rates of predation and sediment erosion all related to levels of meadow fragmentation and density, with lower erosion in denser areas and more fish species in vegetated areas far from meadow edges. Overall, this thesis combines restoration and conservation approaches to optimise restoration and reduce human impacts on coastal seagrass beds while engaging local communities to increase awareness

Innovative Model Based Systems Engineering approach for the design of hypersonic transportation systems

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Preliminary Design and Simulation of a Thermal Management System with Integrated Secondary Power Generation Capability for a Mach 8 Aircraft Concept Exploiting Liquid Hydrogen

This paper introduces the concept of a thermal management system (TMS) with integrated on-board power generation capabilities for a Mach 8 hypersonic aircraft powered by liquid hydrogen (LH2). This work, developed within the EU-funded STRATOFLY Project, aims to demonstrate an opportunity for facing the challenges of hypersonic flight for civil applications, mainly dealing with thermal and environmental control, as well as propellant distribution and on-board power generation, adopting a highly integrated plant characterized by a multi-functional architecture. The TMS concept described in this paper makes benefit of the connection between the propellant storage and distribution subsystems of the aircraft to exploit hydrogen vapors and liquid flow as the means to drive a thermodynamic cycle able, on one hand, to ensure engine feed and thermal control of the cabin environment, while providing, on the other hand, the necessary power for other on-board systems and utilities, especially during the operation of high-speed propulsion plants, which cannot host traditional generators. The system layout, inspired by concepts studied within precursor EU-funded projects, is detailed and modified in order to suggest an operable solution that can be installed on-board the reference aircraft, with focus on those interfaces impacting its performance requirements and integration features as part of the overall systems architecture of the plane. Analysis and modeling of the system is performed, and the main results in terms of performance along the reference mission profile are discussed

Innovative Multiple Matching Charts approach to support the conceptual design of hypersonic vehicles

Several well-established best practices and reliable tools have been developed along the years to support aircraft conceptual and preliminary design. In this context, one of the most widely used tool is the Matching Chart (MC), a graphical representation of the different performance requirements (curves representing the thrust-to-weight ratio (T/W) requirement as function of the wing loading (W/S)) for each mission phase. The exploitation of this tool allows the identification of a feasible design space as well as the definition of a reference vehicle configuration in terms of maximum thrust, maximum take-off weight, and wing surface since the very beginning of the design process. Although the tool was originally developed for conventional aircraft, several extensions and updates of the mathematical models have been proposed over the years to widen its application to innovative configurations. Following this trend, this paper presents a further evolution of the MC model to support the conceptual design of high-speed transportation systems, encompassing supersonic and hypersonic flight vehicles. At this purpose, this paper reports and discusses the updates of the methodology laying behind the generation of the MC for high-speed transportation. Eventually, the results of the validation of the updated methodology and tool are reported, using as case study, the STRATOFLY MR3 vehicle configuration, a Mach 8 antipodal civil transportation system, currently under development within the H2020 STRATOFLY project

Propellant subsystem design for hypersonic cruiser exploiting liquid hydrogen

The possibility of establishing a new paradigm for commercial aviation towards high-speed flight in the next decades shall be inevitably preceded by the increase of Technology Readiness Level for those relevant enabling technologies associated to propulsion, thermal management and on-board subsystems, with particular attention also to environmental sustainability and economic viability of the proposed concepts. New design methodologies for both aircraft and on-board subsystems design shall then be based on holistic approaches able to catch the strong interactions between vehicle configuration, mission and subsystems architecture, which characterize high-speed aircraft layouts. This paper proposes a methodology for the preliminary sizing of propellant subsystems for liquid hydrogen powered hypersonic cruisers. Making benefit of traditional approaches, the process aims at introducing new design aspects directly connected to the peculiar multifunctional architecture of on-board subsystems for high-speed vehicles, so to be able to include additional analyses in early design stages, especially in case of high level of on-board integration. Notably, impact of requirements for Center of Gravity control, thermal, and, in general, energy management are considered as integral part of the method, with crucial implications on architecture selection. After the introduction of design algorithms for subsystem sizing, the STRATOFLY MR3 hypersonic cruiser is taken as reference case study in order to provide a practical example of application of the proposed approach on a highly integrated platform

Systems Engineering and Its Application to Industrial Product Development

PREFACE : Mastering the complexity of innovative systems currently looks a challenging goal of design and product development as well as embedding a suitable degree of smartness in devices, machines and equipment to make them able of adapting their operation to variable conditions or effects of a harsh environment. This goal is achieved through a continuous monitoring of the system in service, an effec-tive control of its behavior and a wide connectivity towards many other systems. Only an effective system design and manufacture, able to cover all the required actions, can assure this kind of assessment overall the life cycle since a very ear-ly concept of the product to a full disposal and service. Complexity makes hard managing the product development, because of the number of functions, subsystems, components and related interfaces usually in-volved, like in motor vehicles, robots, railways systems, aircrafts and spacecrafts as well as in large industrial manufacturing systems or very innovative microsys-tems and bioinspired devices. A crucial issue in this activity is performing a bright and complete elicitation of requirements, which need to be fully and suit-ably allocated to the system components, through a clear traceability, especially in systems produced as a result of material processing and assembling of parts. Moreover, the product must fit the requirements associated to some customer needs, innovation targets, and technical standards and be compatible with the manufacturer’s capabilities. As it looks clear from the current state–of–art, since several years the Systems Engineering assures a suitable answer to the needs above mentioned. It provides a methodology to drive the product lifecycle assessment that is implemented through a well defined process, being based on some specific and graphical lan-guages and even formalized in several tools enabling the required analyses, tak-ing advantage of the capabilities of some dedicated commercial software. Those contents lead to create a platform, consisting of a sort of tools chain, which might be used and shared among different industrial and professional partners to digitalize both the information and even the whole industrial product develop-ment, as far as the current strategy referred to as “Industry 4.0 / The Factory of the Future” brightly suggests and supports. The so–called Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is then successfully proposing an effective and modern al-ternative to the document-based approach, using data models as a main element of the design process. Some technical standards already drive the user in imple-menting the Systems Engineering, thus leading to develop a systematic approach the design aimed at satisfying the customer needs. Suitable capabilities in the manufactured system are assured by the so–called architectural frameworks, which support the system development and integration. The Model Based Systems Engineering allows proceeding with a modeling activity which investigates requirements, behavior and architecture through a combined operational, functional and logical analysis, being linked and interop-erated with a mathematical and physical modeling, which is typically more known and widely used within the industrial engineering. A full integration of all the activities of the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is currently going on, to include the system architecture definition and its Application Lifecycle Man-agement (ALM) as well as the Product Data Management (PDM), i.e. the design activity together with the tasks of production, testing, homologation and service. A recognized standard certification to qualify the Systems Engineer is even available as the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) pro-vides. The scenario above described is strongly integrated with the increasing devel-opment of both the network and the cyber–physical systems, for a fully distribut-ed connectivity, to be exploited in advanced smart systems and devices as well as in intelligent manufacturing, according to the most recent strategies of innova-tion as the “Industry 4.0” initiative and the “Lean manufacturing” idea. Simulta-neously, the system smartness and connectivity together increase the demand of data transmission and elaboration, thus linking this topic to the technology of big data management, whilst they benefit of the progress in information technology, through a secure cloud based on the network. The context just described motivates the fast diffusion of the Model Based Systems Engineering as a tool for innovating all the production processes. The increasing demand of specialized software and of educational activities as well as the number of workshops and conferences focused on this topic confirm this trend. However, it might be remarked that several contributions to the literature about the Systems Engineering widely grew up during the last years, thus making the Reader sometimes confused, especially when approaching this topic at first. The Systems Engineering topics are so many that it looks rather difficult mas-tering its skills, without a preliminary classification of contents. Technical do-mains involved are mainly those of engineering and computer science, although many other ones play the role of a daily user of this methodology. According to the most recent development of the Systems Engineering, whose typical applica-tion fields were the software and electronic systems even for space missions, the current focus consists of several industrial systems, being gradually innovated by introducing the tailored solutions of mechatronics. It is worthy noticing that a significant advancement was introduced between the very early implementation of the Systems Engineering and its recent evolution, since several new applica-tions are focused on the production of systems, which need to be manufactured through a material processing. Usually, they exhibit some attributes related both to their physical nature and to the functions performed, thus requiring to model both their functional and physical behaviors together. This need is changing the scenario of the typical applications of the Systems Engineering as software de-sign. This handbook expressively avoids to cover all the typical contents of the spe-cialized literature of the Model Based Systems Engineering, whilst is aimed at making easier a first approach to this topic and sharing a preliminary experience performed by the authors within some industrial domains, by proceeding in the modeling activity in a real industrial environment. The main goal is drawing a sort of simple and hopefully clear roadmap in modeling and developing the in-dustrial and material systems and in implementing the Systems Engineering, par-ticularly in the design activity. Therefore, the target audience of this handbook includes professional engineers, scientists and students dealing with the Applica-tion Lifecycle Management and the system architecture assessment, more than the Product Data Management or the whole Product Lifecycle Management. The approach followed is that of introducing some examples of implementa-tion of the Systems Engineering, by proceeding step by step from the screening of needs and the elicitation of requirements till a synthesis of the system design. Each action will be referred to the literature, related to the implementation of the Systems Modeling Language or SysML and to the use of some tools available on market, thus highlighting benefits, drawbacks and current limitations of some dedicated software or even of some proposed methodologies. Several comments will be provided to describe the troubles shared among some users of the Sys-tems Engineering as they were detected in daily practice by the authors. They wish that this handbook could briefly and gradually provide the Reader with a preliminary guideline to approach professionally the Model Based Systems En-gineering, by understanding its main contents and applying it to the industrial environment. As a desired result, this work might be considered as an integration of some textbooks of Machine Design, and it is aimed at completing the education within Engineering Design or at simply providing a friendly introduction to the Systems Engineerin