Search results for "efficiency"
showing 10 items of 1430 documents
Improvement of energy efficiency and quality of street lighting in South Italy as an action of Sustainable Energy Action Plans. The case study of Com…
2015
Abstract Existing street lighting systems, in most of South Italy cities, are often inefficient due to the obsolescence of lamps and luminaires and of ineffective light control systems unable to implement efficient on-off and dimming strategies. Energy efficiency improvement, in street lighting systems, is often one of the key actions to be adopted by Public Administration in their Sustainable Energy Action Plan in the framework of the “Covenant of Majors” activities. As a task of FACTOR 20 project, a set of planning options has been analysed and proposed. Particularly, street lighting efficiency projects have been studied for representative case studies. A detailed survey of the public lig…
Multicriteria evaluation of heating choices for a new sustainable residential area
2015
Abstract The city of Loviisa in Finland is planning a new sustainable residential area with a total of 240,000 m2 of residential houses and apartment buildings with services. The city wants to promote sustainable energy solutions in the area, considering various renewable energy forms for heating. The aim of this research is to evaluate which heating system would be best for a new single-family house when different technical, economic, environmental and usability criteria are considered. A group of experts evaluated the alternative heating systems with respect to the criteria. The citizens were involved with a questionnaire to provide preference information for different criteria. Altogethe…
Smartness, City Efficiency and Entrepreneurship Milieu
2017
The definition of smart city and its measurement are not shared. Different characteristics define a city as smart, which is strictly linked to urban efficiency and to entrepreneurship spirit in a multifaceted way as well as to citizens’ well-being. On the basis of the comparison between city and entrepreneur behaviour and on the definition of Giffinger et al. (2007) of smart city, this chapter verifies the efficiency of a sample of European cities using a stochastic frontier approach. Departing from this analysis, the chapter develops the relative smartness definition based on the efficient use of its own resources and related to the different context. Moreover, as a city becomes close to t…
Efficiency of wastewater treatment facilities: The influence of scale economies.
2018
The water cycle, from catchment to discharge, is a sector that involves an important investment and operation and maintenance costs. In particular, sewage treatment is a challenge for governments because they are having to consider economic, environmental, and social aspects. Within the European Union, implementation of Directive 91/271/EEC is responsible for the location of wastewater treatment facilities in the territory, due to the requirement that all urban areas must have this infrastructure to reduce the environmental impact of treated water in water bodies. Different sizes of municipalities affect the design of each wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and cause variations in the operat…
Pollution and economic growth: a maximum likelihood estimation of environmental Kuznets curve
2011
As in Brock and Taylor (2011) in this paper we consider the importance of the relationship between the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) Literature and the Economic Growth Theories. To address this issue we construct country production functions that directly incorporate CO2 emissions as input and estimate them using Stochastic Frontiers. This approach differs from that of Brock and Taylor (2011) but is similar to the one followed by Koop (1998). By introducing the environmental “bads” directly in the production function, we can analyse their contribution to total output growth. We highlight an important contribution of CO2 emissions to growth and find out that the EKC seems not to hold, at…
Xenobiotic metabolizing enzyme activities and viability are well preserved in EDTA-isolated rat liver parenchymal cells after cryopreservation
1995
Rat liver parenchymal cells (PC) were isolated by EDTA perfusion and were purified by a subsequent Percoll centrifugation. The isolated PC had a viability of 95%, as judged by trypan blue exclusion. Freshly isolated PC were cryopreserved with an optimized protocol in a computer-controlled freezer. After thawing, the PC still retained a viability of 89%. The activities of representative xenobiotic metabolizing enzymes were compared between freshly isolated and cryopreserved PC after thawing. The cytochrome P450 content and the cytochrome P450 2C11 isoenzyme activity, determined by hydroxylation of testosterone in intact cells, were not affected by the cryopreservation. The following phase II…
Orthogonal Multicarrier Transmission with Modal Channel Estimation
2009
A novel multi-carrier orthogonal transmission scheme is presented. While being simpler to implement, it has a spectral efficiency and design parameters similar to those of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing based on Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OFDM/OQAM). A parametric channel estimation technique is subsequently reported. The proposed technique is based on an algorithm obtained from classic Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) by relaxation of the hypothesis on the number of measurements with respect to the number of sensors. Numerical simulations show that our proposal outperforms previous works in this field.
Estimation of urban structural flood damages: the case study of Palermo
2000
Abstract The estimation of flood damage is a fundamental step in the economic analysis of a flood control projects. In particular, frequency–damage functions, derived from the hydrologic, hydraulic and damage relationships, are one of the fundamental pieces of information upon which expenditure decisions are based. The aim of this study has been to develop an empirical frequency–damage relationship, obtained by means of detailed local studies, which could be a judgement tool for flood mitigation measures in strongly urbanised drainage areas. Monuments and other estates having a cultural or artistic significance have been specifically taken into account. The analysis has been carried out for…
Shared Governance and Reasonableness as Ethical Contributions to Health Policy
2013
La salud es uno de los derechos humanos fundamentales. Reconocerla como tal conlleva la obligación estatal de garantizar un mínimo de oportunidades para mantenerla o recuperarla cuando se pierde. Ese mínimo puede quedar sin cubrir en épocas de crisis económica, como la que estamos viviendo. La medicina gestionada (managed care) centrada en lo económico surgió tras la crisis de 1973, con el objetivo de condicionar las decisiones clínicas por factores económicos. En la práctica, la medicina gestionada convirtió el control de los costes económicos en un fin en sí mismo olvidando la equidad, por lo que ha sido cuestionada éticamente. Desde entonces, muchos autores han afrontado la tarea de comp…
Niobium enhanced europium ion luminescence in hafnia nanocrystals
2018
This work was supported by the UL ISSP grant for Scientific Research Projects for Students and Young Researchers SJZ/2016/15 .