Eurotech (Italy)

The requirements of the upcoming aircraft generation based on hybrid or electric propulsion discourage the use of Ice Protection Systems (IPSs) based on hot-air spilled from engine or demanding a large consumption of electrical power. In line with this need, a low-power IPS based on piezoelectric (PZT) technology is investigated in the current article. Its main objective is to protect an aerodynamic surface by removing ice accretions (de-icing). The idea at the basis of the concept is to drive mechanical waves at the interface between the skin and the ice layer to cause the breaking and the detachment. Moving from an assessed layout and numerical simulations providing the most effective design configuration, dedicated small-scale airfoil demonstrators (NACA 0012 with a chord of 310 mm and a span of 150 mm) were manufactured, with the aim of testing the technology within the representative environment of the IFAM Icing Wind Tunnel (IWT). The test results showed, for power consumption of 4.4 kW/m2, ice detachment levels -based on the ice-covered area- between 40 and 50% at −10 °C, about 40% at −20 °C, and a maximum of 15% at −4 °C. The results highlighted the impact of some specific parameters (environmental temperature, skin, and ice thickness) on the effectiveness of the IPS.

Icing mitigation is an essential capability of an aircraft to flying safely as accreted ice can seriously reduce the aerodynamic efficiency and the effectiveness of control surfaces. The requirements of the new generation of aircrafts discourage the use of classical IPSs. A hybrid IPS based on PZT and SHC technologies is considered in this work, which is focused on the realization of IWT demonstrators to test it.

The development of sustainable sludge management systems requires looking at them with a new vision in which the concepts of SD (Sustainable Development) must integrate those of CE (Circular Economy), both concepts subject to the principles of TD (Thermodynamics), thus allowing the adoption of actions that are all the more effective the more complete the evaluation of the social dimension has been.This involves a new "Way of thinking" which sees the sludge system as the "Locomotive" of the entire wastewater/sludge treatment train and is developed through "Ways of acting" which includes both "Technical" actions to maximize recoveries of useful materials and/or or energy, and "Socio/Institutional" actions to overcome barriers linked to local cultures and traditions, also considering that the specific local context heavily influences the choices capable of satisfying the concepts of CE.It follows the need of issuing realistic and applicable regulations and overcoming social barriers, such as lack of infrastructure and/or qualified personnel, to achieve an effective integration of the concepts of CE with the more general ones of sustainability.

Drones are very useful for civil engineering and environmental surveys because drones may increase productivity, allow more regular and comprehensive monitoring of construction progress, monitor the status of infrastructures (e.g. bridges), and anyway collect a vast amount of digital data, which can be easily stored, manipulated and shared. However, while the benefits offered to end users by drones are becoming apparent to the entire professional community, possibly not anyone is yet aware of the conditions to fly drones legally in different jurisdictions. The aim of this article is to respond to some of the most common questions on the regulation of drones, hoping that the answers might facilitate the development of business cases for organisations that have not yet decided to use drones, or which intend to expand their use. In the USA Part 107 lists detailed limitations and conditions for the UA flight, but it does not have a clear list of responsibilities of the RPIC compared with the wider responsibilities of the UAS operator (e.g. the commercial company employing the pilot). In the EU, USA, and other jurisdictions, the first obligation to legally fly a drone for professional purposes is registration; the drone (if MTOM 250 g or more) in the USA and the operator in the EU (even if the drone is below 250 g). Virtual and ‘face-to-face’ courses on the regulation of non-military drones are available at the Joint Aviation Authorities – Training Organisation (JAA-TO).

Condition Monitoring (CM) is an extremely critical application of the Internet of Things (IoT) within Industry 4.0 and Smart City scenarios, especially following the recent energy crisis. CM aims to monitor the status of a physical appliance over time and in real time in order to react promptly when anomalies are detected, as well as perform predictive maintenance tasks. Current deployments suffer from both interoperability and management issues within their engineering process at all phases– from their design to their deployment, to their management–, often requiring human intervention. Furthermore, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape and the heterogeneity of IoT solutions hinder a seamless onboarding process of legacy devices and systems. In this paper, we tackle these problems by first proposing an architecture for CM based on both abstraction layers and toolchains, i.e., automated pipelines of engineering tools aimed at supporting the engineering process. In particular, we introduce four different toolchains, each of them dedicated to a well-defined task (e.g., energy monitoring). This orthogonal separation of concerns aims to simplify both the understanding of a complex ecosystem and the accomplishment of independent tasks. We then illustrate our implementation of a complete CM system that follows said architecture as a real Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) pilot of the Arrowhead Tools project, by describing in detail every single tool that we developed. We finally show how our pilot achieves the main objectives of the project: the reduction of engineering costs, the integration of legacy systems, and the interoperability with IoT frameworks.

This paper presents and analyzes the visual assessment process of the MPEG Call for Proposals (CfP) for Dynamic Mesh Coding. The subjective evaluation for this type of data requires an adapted evaluation. In the CfP, a common rendering process of video sequences is applied according to camera paths which are not revealed to the proponents. The formal visual evaluation is performed on the rendered video sequences following the well-established DCR/DSIS protocol. This approach asserts a transparent process, a fair treatment of all proposals, and reproducible MOS results. This is demonstrated by a narrow range of confidence intervals (maximum 0.59) of the resulting MOS. The MOS results are further analyzed with respect to objective metrics used in the context of the CfP as well as objective metrics computed from the rendered video sequences. The results underline the challenges in the relation between objective metrics and MOS. Metrics including texture information are shown to perform better than purely geometry-based approaches. The metrics computed on the rendered video sequences show a generally higher correlation with MOS, VMAF performing best in this category.

The Navier-Stokes differential equations describe the motion of fluids which are incompressible. The three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations misbehave very badly although they are relatively simple-looking. The solutions could wind up being extremely unstable even with nice, smooth, reasonably harmless initial conditions. A mathematical understanding of the outrageous behaviour of these equations would dramatically alter the field of fluid mechanics. This paper describes why the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations are not solvable, i.e., the equations cannot be used to model turbulence, which is a three-dimensional phenomenon. [The paper is published in an international journal.]

The Internet Of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that envisions a networked infrastructure enabling different types of devices to be interconnected. It creates different kinds of artifacts (e.g., services and applications) in various application domains such as health monitoring, sports monitoring, animal monitoring, enhanced retail services, and smart homes. Recommendation technologies can help to more easily identify relevant artifacts and thus will become one of the key technologies in future IoT solutions. In this article, we provide an overview of existing applications of recommendation technologies in the IoT context and present new recommendation techniques on the basis of real-world IoT scenarios.

This paper presents the first attempt to design an interoperability platform by integrating an RDF based information sharing infrastructure named Smart-M3 within the OSGi framework, enhancing the information level interoperability of the former with the service level interoperability of the latter. Such an interoperability platform provides a generic and simple solution to develop Smart Environment Applications.