Search results for "lcsh:Technology"
showing 10 items of 550 documents
Towards Nearly Zero Energy and Environmentally Sustainable Agritourisms: The Effectiveness of the Application of the European Ecolabel Brand
2020
Tourism represents an important economic driver in Italy, being responsible for approximately 13.2% of the total GDP (a value higher than the reference European average) and for nearly 10% of the regional GDP. Among the touristic sectors, the agritourist ones show a persistent growth, experiencing in 2019 a 6.7 point percentage improvement compared to the 2017 figures. Given this situation, the transition towards a low-carbon path, affecting the building sector for some time, should also involve agritourist buildings, through the release of EU directives, member state laws, and technical rules. On the other hand, agritourism sites could be awarded the Community EU Ecolabel. Unfortunately, a…
Thermoeconomic optimization of a renewable polygeneration system serving a small isolated community
2015
During the last years, special attention has been paid to renewable polygeneration technologies, able of simultaneously producing thermal, cooling, electrical energy and desalinated water from seawater. This paper focuses on an innovative polygeneration system driven by renewable energy sources, including the following technologies: hybrid photovoltaic/thermal collectors, concentrating parabolic trough (CPVT), a biomass heater, a single-stage absorption chiller and a multiple-effect distillation desalination system. The system is designed to cover the base load of an isolated small community. In previous papers, the dynamic simulation model about plant operation is discussed. In this paper,…
A Review of the Water Desalination Technologies
2021
Desalination is commonly adopted nowadays to overcome the freshwater scarcity in some areas of the world if brackish water or salt water is available. Different kinds of technologies have been proposed in the last century. In this paper, the state of the mainstream solutions is reported, showing the current commercial technologies like reverse osmosis (RO), Multi-Stages Flash desalination (MSF) and Multi-Effect Distillation (MED), and the new frontiers of the research with the aim of exploiting renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass energy. In these cases, seawater treatment plants are the same as traditional ones, with the only difference being that they use a renewable energy s…
Performance Analysis of a RED-MED Salinity Gradient Heat Engine
2018
A performance analysis of a salinity gradient heat engine (SGP-HE) is presented for the conversion of low temperature heat into power via a closed-loop Reverse Electrodialysis (RED) coupled with Multi-Effect Distillation (MED). Mathematical models for the RED and MED systems have been purposely developed in order to investigate the performance of both processes and have been then coupled to analyze the efficiency of the overall integrated system. The influence of the main operating conditions (i.e., solutions concentration and velocity) has been quantified, looking at the power density and conversion efficiency of the RED unit, MED Specific Thermal Consumption (STC) and at the overall syste…
Know your full potential: Quantitative Kelvin probe force microscopy on nanoscale electrical devices
2018
In this study we investigate the influence of the operation method in Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) on the measured potential distribution. KPFM is widely used to map the nanoscale potential distribution in operating devices, e.g., in thin film transistors or on cross sections of functional solar cells. Quantitative surface potential measurements are crucial for understanding the operation principles of functional nanostructures in these electronic devices. Nevertheless, KPFM is prone to certain imaging artifacts, such as crosstalk from topography or stray electric fields. Here, we compare different amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) KPFM methods on a reference s…
A Two-Stage Reconstruction of Microstructures with Arbitrarily Shaped Inclusions
2020
The main goal of our research is to develop an effective method with a wide range of applications for the statistical reconstruction of heterogeneous microstructures with compact inclusions of any shape, such as highly irregular grains. The devised approach uses multi-scale extended entropic descriptors (ED) that quantify the degree of spatial non-uniformity of configurations of finite-sized objects. This technique is an innovative development of previously elaborated entropy methods for statistical reconstruction. Here, we discuss the two-dimensional case, but this method can be generalized into three dimensions. At the first stage, the developed procedure creates a set of black synthetic …
Ohmic Contacts on p-Type Al-Implanted 4H-SiC Layers after Different Post-Implantation Annealings
2019
This paper reports on the electrical activation and Ohmic contact properties on p-type Al-implanted silicon carbide (4H-SiC). In particular, the contacts were formed on 4H-SiC-implanted layers, subjected to three different post-implantation annealing processes, at 1675 °
Classification of Heart Sounds Using Convolutional Neural Network
2020
Heart sounds play an important role in the diagnosis of cardiac conditions. Due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), it is problematic and time-consuming for experts to discriminate different kinds of heart sounds. Thus, objective classification of heart sounds is essential. In this study, we combined a conventional feature engineering method with deep learning algorithms to automatically classify normal and abnormal heart sounds. First, 497 features were extracted from eight domains. Then, we fed these features into the designed convolutional neural network (CNN), in which the fully connected layers that are usually used before the classification layer were replaced with a global averag…
Performance of Fine-Tuning Convolutional Neural Networks for HEp-2 Image Classification
2020
The search for anti-nucleus antibodies (ANA) represents a fundamental step in the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases. The test considered the gold standard for ANA research is indirect immunofluorescence (IIF). The best substrate for ANA detection is provided by Human Epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cells. The first phase of HEp-2 type image analysis involves the classification of fluorescence intensity in the positive/negative classes. However, the analysis of IIF images is difficult to perform and particularly dependent on the experience of the immunologist. For this reason, the interest of the scientific community in finding relevant technological solutions to the problem has been high. Deep lea…
Abrupt elastic-to-plastic transition in pentagonal nanowires under bending
2019
MD modeling and calculations were supported by Russian Science Foundation project grant 18-19-00645 “Adhesion of polymer-based soft materials: from liquid to solid”; mechanical testing and FEM simulations were supported by Estonian Research Council projects PUT1689 and PUT1372.