Search results for "passive"
showing 10 items of 375 documents
Analytical studies of the Sirocco room of Villa Naselli-Ambleri: A XVI century passive cooling structure in Palermo (Sicily)
2015
Abstract This work focuses on a passive cooling architecture particularly popular from the Renaissance in Palermo area, as building sumptuous suburban villas became a real hobby for the Sicilian aristocracy. A Sirocco room is an artificial subterranean construction, built close to a water spring in order to reproduce the pleasant conditions of freshness that could be experienced in a natural cavern. In these places, nobles used to spend their time with friends to escape from the hot summer. The room of Villa Naselli-Ambleri is nowadays the best preserved in Palermo thanks to its owners’ conservation care and it is unique for its cooling operating principle. The above-mentioned consideration…
Is the NZEB Benchmarking Approach Suitable for Assessing Energy Retrofit Design?
2013
Currently, many effort have been done to enable energy saving issues in building design and many definitions have been introduced for most performing constructions based on energy balance between energy demand and supply. Recently, the Net Zero Energy Building theory has bypassed old Passive House concept but many questions still remain open. Present work aims to estimate how NZEB requirements matching could be affected by the choice of their definition and the choice of weighting factor system, to be count in the energy balance. NZEB concept is mainly referred to new buildings design. Its application to existing buildings is for sure an hard task provided the architecture and physical cons…
Economic Feasibility of Measures for Energy Efficiency
2014
In this chapter the economic impact of some measures for energy efficiency, both using automation of technical infrastructures (according to EN 15232) as well as implementing passive measures concerning the use of building materials and techniques (according to EN 15271), is studied. The chapter is organized as follows. First, a technical-economical study on the evaluation of the impact on residential buildings of Building Automation Control, BAC, and Technical Building Management, TBM, systems is presented. Then the same assessment of some passive measures that can be employed is carried out using the Passive House Standard for Mediterranean warm climates is shown. Numerical elaborations h…
Architectural technologies for life environment: passive cooling strategies in the architectures of the Mediterranean area.
2020
The Mediterranean area is a highly interesting place where various States, characterised by different people, histories, and cultures face. Reigns, religions, powers, state structures, people, nationalities, etc., everything seems to be extremely different and far. On the contrary, there are some cultural points that are much closer than they officially appear. Indeed, historically, the commercial trades between the various countries have always been highly intense and the Christian and Muslim reigns, even if in a continuous state of conflict, were reciprocally linked by deep (financial) interests. Therefore, that translated in a wide trade of goods that moved on the Mediterranean Sea acros…
Volcanic plume monitoring at Mount Etna by diffusive (passive) sampling
2004
[1] This paper reports the use of diffusive tubes in determining HF, HCl, and SO2 in the volcanic plume of Mount Etna in an attempt to highlight the potential of this method in studying volcanoes. In a first application a network of 18 diffusive tubes was installed on Etna's flanks, aimed at evaluating the atmospheric dispersion of the volcanic plume on a local scale. Results showed a monotonic decrease in volatile air concentrations with distance from the craters (HF from 0.15 to <0.003 μmol m−3, HCl from 2 to <0.01 μmol m−3, and SO2 from 11 to 0.04 μmol m−3), revealing the prevalently volcanic contribution. Matching of SO2/HCl and HCl/HF volatile ratios with contemporaneous measurements a…
How effective are the vegetated surfaces for the CO2 sequestration? Analyzing parameters and methods
2021
Human activities are severe sources of greenhouse gases and, particularly, of CO 2 . This trend, according with the highly demanding criteria released by the international institutions, must be suitably cut, in order of turning the pollutant emissions within limits that will guarantee a sustainable and environmentally safe development of the human species. Apart the measures that are since long time usually implemented in the technological systems, other interventions should be properly adopted in supporting the sustainability of the anthropic activities. These actions mainly apply to the so-called bioclimatic and passive measures and, particularly, could usefully refer to the plantation of…
Mechanisms of resistance to autoimmune disease induced by T-cell vaccination.
1991
Many human autoimmune diseases tend to progress slowly. Phases of rapid progression may come to a halt and may be followed by transient or even permanent remissions. Autoimmune diseases in animals either arise spontaneously or are induced. The former tend to be slowly progressive, the latter mostly acute to subacute, and usually followed by spontaneous remissions. The mechanisms at work that prevent rapid disease progression and can effect remissions are poorly understood, but they may provide us with a clue both to natural self-tolerance and to the therapeutic induction of self-tolerance.
A Self-Contained Electro-Hydraulic Cylinder: Modeling, Control Design, Simulation and Experimental Validation
2018
Master's thesis Mechatronics MAS500 - University of Agder 2018 In the constant effort to improve the efficiency of hydraulic systems, the pressure drop over hydraulic valves has been one of the major obstacles. In the Self-Contained Electro-Hydraulic Cylinder, the directional valve and the hydraulic power unit have been replaced by a bi-directional axial piston pump and a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor. Actuation of the cylinder is performed by controlling the direction of rotation and the velocity of the motor. Originally the purpose of this project was to: "Design a proper control algorithm for an existing novel selfcontained electro-hydraulic cylinder, implement it on the main boom o…
Building integrated solar thermal design: assessment of performances of a low cost solar wall in a typical Italian building
2016
Abstract Present work deals with the topic of building integration of solar thermal collector (BIST) as a refurbishment measure. Such equipment, more than its main function as heating generator, plays a specific role as a building component (envelope finishes, thermal insulation layer, roof cover etc). Consequently, from a heat transfer point of view, an integrated component affects twice the global building balance: supporting the thermal plant (i.e. providing heat for final uses) and modifying the wall heat-transfer pattern (i.e. reducing thermal losses). In turn, the collector performance itself is influenced by the wall structure (back losses reduction). Present work proposes a method f…
Estimation of Vegetation Structure Parameters From SMAP Radar Intensity Observations
2021
In this article, we present a multipolarimetric estimation approach for two model-based vegetation structure parameters (shape A and orientation distribution ψ of the main canopy elements). The approach is based on a reduced observation set of three incoherent (no phase information) polarimetric backscatter intensities (|S HH | 2 , |S HV | 2 , and |S VV | 2 ) combined with a two-parameter (A P and ψ) discrete scatterer model of vegetation. The objective is to understand whether this confined set of observations contains enough information to estimate the two vegetation structure parameters from the L-band radar signals. In order to disentangle soil and vegetation scattering influences on th…