Search results for "NSU"
showing 10 items of 7753 documents
Impact Analysis Using Life Cycle Assessment of Asphalt Production from Primary Data
2020
Road construction and maintenance have a great impact on the environment, owing to the huge volumes of resources involved. Consequently, current production procedures and technologies must be properly investigated, for identifying and quantifying the life cycle environmental impacts produced. In this paper, primary data, i.e., site-specific data directly collected or measured on a reference plant, are analyzed for calculating the impact of the production of a hot mix asphalt. The analysis is performed in a from &ldquo
“Natural wine” consumers and interest in label information: An analysis of willingness to pay in a new Italian wine market segment
2019
Abstract Increasing public attention to issues of health and environmental sustainability has contributed to a growing consumer demand for “natural” food and drinks. As has been observed, this trend has also affected the wine market, leading to the spread of so-called “natural wine”. According to the literature, consumers who are aware of the social and environmental impact of their consumption choices pay more attention to the information displayed on the label as a tool to reduce the risk associated with their purchase. This study seeks to identify which consumers are willing to pay for natural wine and to understand what information on the label influences their choice. This study is one…
From lab to industry: Scaling up green geopolymeric mortars manufacturing towards circular economy
2021
Abstract Construction is nowadays considered an extremely energy intensive industry and one of the main sources of environmental pollution in the world. Therefore, the research and the development of novel energy-saving manufacturing processes and sustainable construction materials is more than ever urgent and challenging. This paper aims at identifying the industrial process for the production of novel geopolymers to be used as a greener substitute for cement, especially the Portland one, widely used for structural applications to significantly reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry. Here, the materials sustainability and the manufacturing process are improved by valo…
Solar and Heat Pump Systems for Domestic Hot Water Production on a Small Island: The Case Study of Lampedusa
2020
The achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, related to energy and resource use, is a critical issue for small and insulated communities. In many minor islands, solar energy is not correctly exploited, and electrical heaters are connected to weak grids with very a high share of generation by fossil fuels. As a consequence, there is the necessity to assess the potential and the suitability of diffusion of alternative systems to avoid dependency on the electrical grid and reduce carbon emissions. This paper aims to evaluate the technical and economic performances of some alternative systems exploiting renewable energy for domestic hot water production. Four different syste…
Sea water desalination and energy consumption: A case study of wave energy converters (WEC) to desalination applications in sicily
2016
Recent studies about interactions among energy and water are considered as a new field of research. As almost all energy generation processes require significant amounts of water, and water requires energy for treatment and transport, so these two resources are inextricably linked. The main aim of this work is a presentation of the use of renewable energy for desalination plants in Sicily: in particular exploitation of wave energy into electrical energy necessary for water treatment. Desalination is the most energy intensive water treatment technology but it could be solution for many problems in water supply for areas with chronic debt of water. The aim of this work is a description of a s…
Robust Network Agreement on Logical Information
2011
Abstract Logical consensus is an approach to distributed decision making which is based on the availability of a network of agents with incomplete system knowledge. The method requires the construction of a Boolean map which defines a dynamic system allowing the entire network to consent on a unique, global decision. Previous work by the authors proved the method to be viable for applications such as intrusion detection within a structured environment, when the agent's communication topology is known in advance. The current work aims at providing a fully distributed protocol, requiring no a priori knowledge of each agent's communication neighbors. The protocol allows the construction of a r…
Analysis of Electrical Energy Demands in Friction Stir Welding of Aluminum Alloys
2017
Abstract Manufacturing processes, as used for discrete part manufacturing, are responsible for a substantial part of the environmental impact of products. Despite that, most of metalworking processes are still poorly documented in terms of environmental footprint. To be more specific, the scientific research has well covered conventional machining processes, concerning the other processes there is a lack of knowledge in terms of environmental load characterization instead. The present paper aims to contribute to fill this knowledge gap and an energetic analysis of Friction Stir welding (FSW) is presented. Following the CO2PE! methodological approach, power studies and a preliminary time stu…
Distributed adaptive leader–follower and leaderless consensus control of a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems : a unified approach
2020
In this paper, distributed adaptive consensus for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems under directed topology condition is investigated. Both leader–follower and leaderless cases are considered in a unified framework. To design distributed controller for each subsystem, a local compensatory variable is generated based on the signals collected from its neighbors. Such a technique enables us to solve the leader–follower consensus and leaderless consensus problems in a unified framework. And it further allows us to treat the leaderless consensus as a special case of the leader–follower consensus. For leader–follower consensus, the assumption that the leader trajectory is linearly para…
Topology design to increase network lifetime in WSN for graph filtering in consensus processes
2018
Graph filters, which are considered as the workhorses of graph signal analysis in the emerging field of signal processing on graphs, are useful for many applications such as distributed estimation in wireless sensor networks. Many of these tasks are based on basic distributed operators such as consensus, which are carried out by sensor devices under limited energy supply. To cope with the energy constraints, this paper focuses on designing the network topology in order to maximize the network lifetime and reduce the energy consumption when applying graph filters. The problem is a complex combinatorial problem and in this work, we propose two efficient heuristic algorithms for solving it. We…
A methodology for evaluating the flexibility potential of domestic air-conditioning systems
2020
The paper presents a methodology for quantifying the electrical flexibility potential of air-conditioning systems (ACS) installed in residential buildings according to the building envelope characteristics and the ACS performance. In order to provide a thorough analysis of the issue, the ACS baseline consumption referred to the indoor temperature of 24°C has been computed for three typical residential buildings built in the South of Italy over different periods. The baseline consumption was used as a reference to estimate the effect of the set point temperature change on the ACS power profile. The results showed that increasing the set-point temperature of ACS by 2°C and 4°C leads to a redu…