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Carsharing is a mode of transportation that provides access to a set of vehicles in the form of organized short-term car rental, serving as a substitute for private car ownership with a number of transportation, environmental, and social benefits. Combining the mobility concept of carsharing with electric vehicles (EVs), referred to as e-carsharing, can contribute not only to more efficient use of the shared vehicles, but also to more sustainable urban mobility in smart cities. In this context, this paper advances the concept of university-based e-carsharing, to serve the mobility needs of an academic community in Bilbao, Spain, focusing on the technical design aspects to cover the energy requirements of the EV fleet of the proposed system through the installation of fast charging posts based on a battery-to-battery approach. In this regard, a MATLAB/Simulink model is implemented to simulate the fast charging infrastructure using the real-world data collected from the university parking lot in order to represent the potential utilization of the EVs. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system design, ensuring that the energy demand of the EVs is successfully covered and concurrently the charging station batteries operate out of the low charge zone.

The electric engine cooling system, where the coolant pump and the radiator fan are driven by electric motors, admits advanced control methods to decrease auxiliary energy consumption. Recent publications show the fuel saving potential of optimal control strategies for the electric cooling system through offline simulations. These strategies often assume full knowledge of the drive cycle and compute the optimal control sequence by expensive global optimization methods. In reality, the full drive cycle is unknown during driving and global optimization not directly applicable on resource-constrained truck electronic control units. This paper reports state-of-the-art engineering achievements of exploiting vehicular onboard prediction for a limited time horizon and minimizing the auxiliary energy consumption of the electric cooling system through real-time optimization. The prediction and optimization are integrated into a model predictive controller (MPC), which is implemented on a dSPACE MicroAutoBox and tested on a truck on a public road. Systematic simulations show that the new method reduces fuel consumption of a 40-tonne truck by 0.36% and a 60-tonne truck by 0.69% in a real drive cycle compared to a base-line controller. The reductions on auxiliary fuel consumption for the 40-tonne and 60-tonne trucks are about 26% and 38%, respectively. Truck experiments validate the consistency between simulations and experiments and confirm the real-time feasibility of the MPC controller.

Available methods for measuring the impact of ocean acidification (OA) and leakage from carbon capture and storage (CCS) on marine sedimentary pH profiles are unsuitable for replicated experimental setups. To overcome this issue, a novel optical sensor application is presented, using off-the-shelf optode technology (MOPP). The application is validated using microprofiling, during a CCS leakage experiment, where the impact and recovery from a high CO2 plume was investigated in two types of natural marine sediment. MOPP offered user-friendliness, speed of data acquisition, robustness to sediment type, and large sediment depth range. This ensemble of characteristics overcomes many of the challenges found with other pH measuring methods, in OA and CCS research. The impact varied greatly between sediment types, depending on baseline pH variability and sediment permeability. Sedimentary pH profile recovery was quick, with profiles close to control conditions 24 h after the cessation of the leak. However, variability of pH within the finer sediment was still apparent 4 days into the recovery phase. Habitat characteristics need therefore to be considered, to truly disentangle high CO2 perturbation impacts on benthic systems. Impacts on natural communities depend not only on the pH gradient caused by perturbation, but also on other processes that outlive the perturbation, adding complexity to recovery.

Estuaries are among the most valuable aquatic systems by their services to human welfare. However, increasing human activities at the watershed along with the pressure of climate change are fostering the co-occurrence of multiple environmental drivers, and warn of potential negative impacts on estuaries resources. At present, no clear understanding of how coastal ecosystems will respond to the non-stationary effect of multiple drivers. Here we analysed the temporal interaction among multiple environmental drivers and their changing priority on shaping phytoplankton response in the Bahía Blanca Estuary, SW Atlantic Ocean. The interaction among environmental drivers and the number of significant direct and indirect effects on chlorophyll concentration increased over time in concurrence with enhanced anthropogenic stress, changing winter climate and wind patterns. Over the period 1978-1993, proximal variables such as nutrients, water temperature and salinity, showed a dominant effect on chlorophyll, whereas in more recent years (1993-2009) climate signals (SAM and ENSO) boosted indirect effects through its influence on precipitation, wind, water temperature and turbidity. Turbidity emerged as the dominant driver of chlorophyll while in recent years acted synergistically with the concentration of dissolved nitrogen. As a result, chlorophyll concentration showed a significant negative trend and a loss of seasonal peaks reflecting a pronounced reorganisation of the phytoplankton community. We stress the need to account for the changing priority of drivers to understand, and eventually forecast, biological responses under projected scenarios of global anthropogenic change.

Elevated environmental carbon dioxide (pCO2) levels have been found to cause organ damage in the early life stages of different commercial fish species, including Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua). To illuminate the underlying mechanisms causing pathologies in the intestines, the kidney, the pancreas and the liver in response to elevated pCO2, we examined related gene expression patterns in Atlantic cod reared for two months under three different pCO2 regimes: 380 μatm (control), 1800 μatm (medium) and 4200 μatm (high). We extracted RNA from whole fish sampled during the larval (32 dph) and early juvenile stage (46 dph) for relative expression analysis of 18 different genes related to essential metabolic pathways. At 32 dph, larvae subjected to the medium treatment displayed an up-regulation of genes mainly associated with fatty acid and glycogen synthesis (GYS2, 6PGL, ACoA, CPTA1, FAS and PPAR1b). Larvae exposed to the high pCO2 treatment upregulated fewer but similar genes (6PGL, ACoA and PPAR1b,). These data suggest stress-induced alterations in the lipid and fatty acid metabolism and a disrupted lipid homeostasis in larvae, providing a mechanistic link to the findings of lipid droplet overload in the liver and organ pathologies. At 46 dph, no significant differences in gene expression were detected, confirming a higher resilience of juveniles in comparison to larvae when exposed to elevated pCO2 up to 4200 μatm.

It is increasingly evident that a sustainable use of the sea and of technologies and services that support this sustainability are fundamental for the impact they have also on the sustainability of the mainland. The Blue Growth, a knowledge driven exploitation of the marine resources, is a target that EU and many other countries have set to improve the societal wellbeing. In particular the Mediterranean has still unexploited potentials to provide very specific ecosystem services and new technologies in order to contribute to economic growth. To this aim, the European Commission funded the Bluemed project (2016-2020), which involves nine different European countries (Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain) and their relevant stakeholders in the definition of shared strategies at national and international level; the Italian National Research Council (CNR) coordinates Bluemed. Given this framework, the present paper, starts from the main outcomes of Bluemed on research and innovation in the Mediterranean, through a detailed analysis of the most relevant activities and thematic objectives for some of the main marine and maritime socio-economic drivers (transport, tourism, energy have been chosen). Then, on that basis and with the support of a deep literature overview, it tries to understand the present status of some relevant sectors for their potential impact on technology and innovation on this maritime area, highlighting the main obstacles to the fulfilment of the planned priorities and proposing possible strategies to overcome them; all this starting from an Italian perspective. The emphasis is put just on the gaps and barriers to Blue Growth, and on the ways to overcome them, to help the identification of cross-cutting high-level priorities and actions for research and innovation, to be shared at national and Mediterranean level. The main contribution of the work presented here is the recognition that concrete steps towards a "Blue" economy can be achieved only by going beyond the identification of research and innovation challenges and priorities for specific sectors, since they necessarily reflect a partial, sectorial view, and that the main effort must be directed towards an integrated view of how different activities, often conflicting, might coexists. Another finding is the planning of roadmaps to follow so that new technologies/knowledge could overcome those conflicts. As a consequence, the aim and the output of the paper is not proposing a further detailed list of Research and Innovation priorities, but is instead trying to identify how the most relevant R&I challenges for Blue Growth already available can be more efficiently pursued following the roadmaps proposed in the paper.

Purpose: The objective of this study was to provide insights into the most recent responses of sediments to climate change and their capability to sequester atmospheric carbon (C). Methods: Three sediment cores were collected, one from the western Black Sea, and two from the southern Adriatic Sea. Cores were extruded and sectioned into 1 cm or 0.5 cm intervals. Sections were frozen, weighed, freeze-dried, and then weighed again to obtain dry weights. Freeze-dried samples were dated by using lead 210 (210Pb) and cesium 137/ americium 241 (137Cs/241Am). Organic and inorganic C were determined by combustion. Particle size distribution was determined using a Beckman Coulter particle size analyzer (LS 13, 320 ; Beckman Coulter Inc.). Mineralogical analyses were carried out by a Philips X’Pert powder diffractometer. Results: Sedimentation and organic and inorganic C accumulation rates increased with time in both the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea. The increase in accumulation rates continued after the global introduction in the early 1970s of controls on the release of phosphorus (P) into the environment and despite the reduced sediment yield of major rivers (Po and Danube). Therefore, the increased accumulation of organic and inorganic C in the sediments cannot be assigned only to nutrient availability. Instead, we suggest that the increase in organic C is the consequence of the increase in atmospheric C, which has made more carbon dioxide (CO2) available to phytoplankton, thus enabling more efficient photosynthesis. This process known as CO2 fertilization may increase the organic C accumulation in sediments. Simultaneously, the increase of sea temperatures decreases the calcite solubility resulting in increases of the inorganic C accumulation. Conclusion: Our results suggest that long-term, general increases in accumulation rates of organic and inorganic C in sediments are the consequence of increases in atmospheric C. This shows that coastal sediments play an important role in C uptake and thus in regulating the Earth’s climate.