Search results for "purpose"

Dune systems' characterization and evolution in the andalusia mediterranean coast (Spain)

2020

This paper deals with the characterization and evolution of dune systems along the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia, in the South of Spain, a first step to assess their relevant value in coastal flood protection and in the determination of sound management strategies to protect such valuable ecological systems. Different dune types were mapped as well as dune toe position and fragmentation, which favors dune sensitivity to storms&rsquo

Future Climate Forcings and Olive Yield in a Mediterranean Orchard

2014

The olive tree is one of the most characteristic rainfed trees in the Mediterranean region. Observed and forecasted climate modifications in this region, such as the CO2 concentration and temperature increase and the net radiation, rainfall and wind speed decrease, will likely alter vegetation water stress and modify productivity. In order to simulate how climatic change could alter soil moisture dynamic, biomass growth and fruit productivity, a water-driven crop model has been used in this study. The numerical model, previously calibrated on an olive orchard located in Sicily (Italy) with a satisfactory reproduction of historical olive yield data, has been forced with future climate scenar…

Treatment of Oily Wastewater with Membrane Bioreactor Systems

2017

The aim of the present work was to investigate the behavior of a membrane bioreactor (MBR) system for the treatment of oily wastewater. A bench scale MBR was fed with synthetic wastewater containing diesel fuel. Organic carbon, hydrocarbon and ammonium removal, kinetic constants, extracellular polymeric substances production, and membrane fouling rates were monitored. The MBR plant was operated for more than 200 days, and the results highlighted good carbon removal and nitrification, suggesting a sort of biomass adaptation to hydrocarbons. Membrane fouling analysis showed an increase in total resistance, likely due to hydrocarbons, which caused an irreversible fouling (pore blocking) mainly…

Real-Time Monocular Segmentation and Pose Tracking of Multiple Objects

2016

We present a real-time system capable of segmenting multiple 3D objects and tracking their pose using a single RGB camera, based on prior shape knowledge. The proposed method uses twist-coordinates for pose parametrization and a pixel-wise second-order optimization approach which lead to major improvements in terms of tracking robustness, especially in cases of fast motion and scale changes, compared to previous region-based approaches. Our implementation runs at about 50–100 Hz on a commodity laptop when tracking a single object without relying on GPGPU computations. We compare our method to the current state of the art in various experiments involving challenging motion sequences and diff…

Accelerating collision detection for large-scale crowd simulation on multi-core and many-core architectures

2013

The computing capabilities of current multi-core and many-core architectures have been used in crowd simulations for both enhancing crowd rendering and simulating continuum crowds. However, improving the scalability of crowd simulation systems by exploiting the inherent parallelism of these architectures is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose different parallelization strategies for the collision check procedure that takes place in agent-based simulations. These strategies are designed for exploiting the parallelism in both multi-core and many-core architectures like graphic processing units (GPUs). As for the many-core implementations, we analyse the bottlenecks of a previous G…

Does persistent employment instability affect fertility? A couple perspective

2014

GPU accelerated Monte Carlo simulation of the 2D and 3D Ising model

2009

The compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is a programming approach for performing scientific calculations on a graphics processing unit (GPU) as a data-parallel computing device. The programming interface allows to implement algorithms using extensions to standard C language. With continuously increased number of cores in combination with a high memory bandwidth, a recent GPU offers incredible resources for general purpose computing. First, we apply this new technology to Monte Carlo simulations of the two dimensional ferromagnetic square lattice Ising model. By implementing a variant of the checkerboard algorithm, results are obtained up to 60 times faster on the GPU than on a curren…

Cultural institutions as agents of urban and community regeneration in the (post-)pandemic city. The case of the «Laboratorio Zen Insieme» in Palermo

2022

Although all cities in the world have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, its impacts on the territories, yet to be understood, are unevenly distributed, revealing extremely varied imbalances depending on the places. However, it is clear that the virus and its variants have aggravated pre-existing socio-spatial inequalities, creating new ones and bringing attention back to those implications between space, planning, public health and citizenship that are at the origins of contemporary urbanism. In a reference framework in which the crisis is globalized but unequal and in the absence of a welfare system capable of responding to the urgencies of the most marginalized social contexts and g…

The BaBar detector: Upgrades, operation and performance

2013

The BABAR detector operated successfully at the PEP-Il asymmetric e(+) e(-) collider at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1999 to 2008. This report covers upgrades, operation, and performance of the collider and the detector systems, as well as the trigger, online and offline computing, and aspects of event reconstruction since the beginning of data taking.

Impeller optimization in crossflow hydraulic turbines

2021

Crossflow turbines represent a valuable choice for energy recovery in aqueducts, due to their constructive simplicity and good efficiency under variable head jump conditions. Several experimental and numerical studies concerning the optimal design of crossflow hydraulic turbines have already been proposed, but all of them assume that structural safety is fully compatible with the sought after geometry. We show first, with reference to a specific study case, that the geometry of the most efficient impeller would lead shortly, using blades with a traditional circular profile made with standard material, to their mechanical failure. A methodology for fully coupled fluid dynamic and mechanical …