Search results for " ingegneria"

Hydrocarbons removal from real marine sediments: Analysis of degradation pathways and microbial community development during bioslurry treatment

2022

In this study, real marine sediments polluted by petroleum compounds were treated by means of a bioslurry pilot scale reactor. The treatment performance was evaluated by measuring the removal of total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH), coupled to further analyses required to understand the mechanisms involved in the biodegradation process. The maximum TPH-removal efficiency reached 86 % at the end of experiments. Moreover, high throughput 16S RNA gene sequencing was used to describe the microbiome composition in sediment prior to, and after, bioslurry treatment, in order to identify the taxa mostly entailed in the TPH removal process. The raw sediment was mostly colonized by members of Sulfurimon…

Uncertainty in environmental and hydrological mathematical modelling

2012

Engineers are increasingly called to deal with practical problems related to water resources management, risk analysis, environmental engineering and water pollution. Providing a way forward to solve the above questions requires setting up mathematical models that are affected by uncertainty, that in many cases is relevant. In fact, the theories that are employed for providing solutions to engineer’s problems are not exact sciences: even if it is methodologically rigorous, it is incapable of producing precise results, for the presence of inherent randomness that translates in indeterminacy and therefore uncertainty. To cope with uncertainty is a challenge for scientists and practitioners, t…

Enhanced one-component spray polyurethane foams via sol-gel microspheres doped with aqueous glycerol

2013

The sol-gel microencapsulation of aqueous glycerol in silica-based microspheres affords functional materials that can be used to cure one-component polyurethane foams (OCF) formulations affording better and greener foam formation. These findings are important and may open the route to more sustainable materials, such as foams, coatings, adhesives, and sealants that are widely utilized in many industrial sectors. © 2013 American Chemical Society.

Governance, contract structure and risk assessment in inter-firm relationships (IFRs) and venture capital investments

2012

Greenhouse gases from wastewater treatment — A review of modelling tools

2016

Nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted from wastewater treatment that contribute to its carbon footprint. As a result of the increasing awareness of GHG emissions from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), new modelling, design, and operational tools have been developed to address and reduce GHG emissions at the plant-wide scale and beyond. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art and the recently developed tools used to understand and manage GHG emissions from WWTPs, and discusses open problems and research gaps. The literature review reveals that knowledge on the processes related to N2O formation, especially due to autotrophic biomass, is still incompl…

Greenhouse gases from wastewater treatment plant: towards a new protocol for field measurements

2015

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) represents an increasing interest in the water industry at the present moment. The biological processes needed for treating wastewater have been found responsible for the unintentional generation of GHGs, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). The quality and quantity of a GHG emitted from a WWTP can significantly vary with the wastewater treated, the process configuration, and the strategies employed in process control. In the recent past, efforts for monitoring and accounting for GHGs emissions from WWTPs have considerably increased, and classifications of emission type were proposed t…

Network embeddedness and new product development in the biopharmaceutical industry: The moderating role of open innovation flow

2015

This paper explores the role of centrality and structural holes positions on the likelihood to develop new products and the moderating role of the open innovation flow, a measure of the net knowledge flow crossing the firm’s boundaries, on the aforementioned relation. We argue that network positions provide the information content to the firm, whilst open innovation flow describes how the firm uses such content, thus the combination of these two concepts has a significant impact on new product development. We test the theoretical framework on a large sample of 544 public companies and data from 1758 agreements among 1890 bio-pharmaceutical firms through the period 2006–2010. Our results sho…

Effect of organic loading rate on the production of Polyhydroxyalkanoates from sewage sludge

2023

The aim of this work was to study the effect of organic loading rate on the production of Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) from sewage sludge. Synthesis of PHA using sewage sludge as platform was achieved in this work. Three pilot-scale selection-sequencing batch reactors (S-SBR) were used for obtaining a culture able to accumulate PHA following a strategy of aerobic dynamic feeding (ADF) at different volumetric organic-loading-rate (vOLR): 1.3, 1.8 and 0.8 g COD L-1 d-1 for S-SBR 1, S-SBR 2 and S-SBR 3, respectively. Decreasing the vOLR enhanced the general performance of the process as for organic matter removal (from 99.2% ± 0.3% in S-SBR-3 to 92 ± 2 in S-SBR-2) while the opposite trend was r…

Interpreting and modelling field data for wastewater dispersion into sea trough dimensional analysis

2008

This paper deals with the mathematical and experimental characterization of a coastal urban wastewater discharge in the South Tyrrhenian Sea, namely the Golfo di Palermo, western Sicily (Italy). The stretch of water lying before the central part of the capital town receives the wastewater originating from about 200 000 inhabitants. The sewage is currently still discharged on-shore without any prior treatment by a free-surface outfall called “Porta Felice”. The Municipality is currently implementing a plan to connect the sewerage system of these areas to the main wastewater treatment plant; at the moment, however, no mitigation measure has been applied yet and the quality of the Gulf is stil…

Multiregression Analysis of the Kinetic Constants in Ephemeral Rivers: The Case Study of the Oreto River

2018

Profuse efforts have been committed to develop efficient tools to measure the ecological status of the receiving water body quality state. The recurrence to mathematical models as support tools for the receiving water body quality assessment can be an optimal choice. Indeed, mathematical models can allow to build-up the cause effect relationship between polluting sources and receiving water quality. Regarding the river water quality modelling, two different kinds of river can be single out: large and small rivers. In the modelling approach, the main differences between the two types of river are reflected in the model kinetic constants. Indeed, the main quality processes which control and g…