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showing 10 items of 32085 documents
A Systematic Review of the Hydrological, Environmental and Durability Performance of Permeable Pavement Systems
2021
Due to urbanization, large portions of vegetated territory have been replaced by waterproof surfaces. The consequences are greater outflows, lower infiltration, and lower evapotranspiration. Pavement systems made with permeable surfaces allow the infiltration of water, ensuring reduction of runoff volume. In this paper, the methods of analysis of the hydrological and environmental performance of the pavement systems are reviewed in the context of urban drainage and regarding their durability. The purpose is to present an overview of the studies published during the last decade in the field. The Pubmed and Web Science Core Collection electronic databases were used to conduct the scientific l…
Occurrence of antibiotics and antiretroviral drugs in source-separated urine, groundwater, surface water and wastewater in the peri-urban area of Chu…
2020
Recently, there has been an increased interest in bridging the knowledge gap in the occurrence and fate of pharmaceuticals in African urban water cycles. In this study, the occurrence of 7 antibiotics and 3 antiretrovirals in source-separated urine, groundwater, wastewater and surface water of the peri-urban area of Chunga in Lusaka, Zambia, was studied. In groundwater, the pharmaceuticals were only sporadically present with 4 antibiotics and 1 antiretroviral detected. The concentration of the antibiotics ranged from below limit of quantification (<LOQ) to 880 ng/L, with sulfamethoxazole having the highest detection frequency of 42.3%. In the surface water, a comparatively high concentrati…
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…
Manufacturing processes as material and energy efficiency strategies enablers: The case of Single Point Incremental Forming to reshape end-of-life me…
2021
Abstract Making materials consumes about 21% of the global energy demand; concerning metals production, it accounts for about 8% of total global energy consumption. Circular economy strategies such as longer life, more intense use, repair, product upgrades, modularity, remanufacturing, component reuse, and open/closed-loop recycling are strategies to put in place urgently to reduce the environmental impact of raw material production. Although recycling of metals is the most used strategy and is being improved in terms of efficiency, it is mandatory moving towards more virtuous circular economy strategies, such as product/component reuse. In this paper a novel reuse strategy for sheet metal …
Adding Active Damping to Energy-Efficient Electro-Hydraulic Systems for Robotic Manipulators — Comparing Pressure and Acceleration Feedback
2020
The growing interest in energy efficiency, plug-and-play commissioning, and reduced maintenance for heavy-duty robotic manipulators directs towards self-contained, electro-hydraulic cylinders. These drives are characterized by extremely low damping that causes unwanted oscillations of the mechanical structure. Adding active damping to this class of energy-efficient architectures is essential. Hence, this paper bridges a literature gap by presenting a systematic comparison grounded on a model-based tuning of both pressure and acceleration feedback. It is shown that both approaches increase the system damping hugely and improve the performance of the linear system. Acceleration feedback shoul…
Towards a Reference Architecture for Archival Systems: Use Case With Product Data
2014
Long-term preservation of product data is imperative for many organizations. A product data archive should be designed to ensure information accessibility and understanding over time. Approaches, such as the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (OAIS RM) and the Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories (ACTDR), provide a framework for conceptually describing and evaluating archives. These approaches are generic and do not focus on particular contexts or content types such as product data. Moreover, these approaches offer no guidance on how to formally and comprehensively describe archival systems. Such descriptions should include the business activities that a…
A non-stationary relay-based 3D MIMO channel model with time-variant path gains for human activity recognition in indoor environments
2021
AbstractExtensive research showed that the physiological response of human tissue to exposure to low-frequency electromagnetic fields is the induction of an electric current in the body segments. As a result, each segment of the human body behaves as a relay, which retransmits the radio-frequency (RF) signal. To investigate the impact of this phenomenon on the Doppler characteristics of the received RF signal, we introduce a new three-dimensional (3D) non-stationary channel model to describe the propagation phenomenon taking place in an indoor environment. Here, the indoor space is equipped with a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. A single person is moving in the indoor space an…
2D/3D Object Recognition and Categorization Approaches for Robotic Grasping
2017
International audience; Object categorization and manipulation are critical tasks for a robot to operate in the household environment. In this paper, we propose new methods for visual recognition and categorization. We describe 2D object database and 3D point clouds with 2D/3D local descriptors which we quantify with the k-means clustering algorithm for obtaining the Bag of Words (BOW). Moreover, we develop a new global descriptor called VFH-Color that combines the original version of Viewpoint Feature Histogram (VFH) descriptor with the color quantization histogram, thus adding the appearance information that improves the recognition rate. The acquired 2D and 3D features are used for train…
Engineering insights from an anthropocentric cyber-physical system: A case study for an assembly station
2016
Abstract To effectively cope with the complexity of manufacturing control problems the cyber-physical systems are engineered to work in the social space. Therefore the research in the field of cyber-physical systems needs to address social aspects when this concept is adopted in factory automation. The paper argues for an anthropocentric cyber-physical reference model as the basic decomposition unit for the design of distributed manufacturing control systems. The model assimilates all the required components (i.e. physical, computational and human) of a synthetic hybrid system in an integrated way. This is due to the real need to design cyber-physical production systems where the technologi…
Experimental results on the economic management of a smart microgrid
2020
The aim of this paper is to assess economic benefits deriving from the adoption of a smart microgrid. To this end, a case study consisting of 250 houses connected to the distribution network through a MV/LV transformer substation has been investigated and implemented in the experimental microgrid built at the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy. The analysis has been performed by comparing three different energy providers: the utility grid, the utility grid with the inclusion of non-programmable renewables generators, and the inclusion of such residential loads into a smart microgrid. The obtained results demonstrated that with the adoption of a smart microgrid significant costs savings c…