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The transition to a low carbon future is starting to affect landscapes around the world. In order for this landscape transformation to be sustainable, renewable energy technologies should not cause critical trade-offs between the provision of energy and that of other ecosystem services such as food production. This literature review advances the body of knowledge on sustainable energy transition with special focus on ecosystem services-based approaches and methods. Two key issues emerge from this review: only one sixth of the published applications on the relation between renewable energy and landscape make use of the ecosystem service framework. Secondly, the applications that do address ecosystem services for landscape planning and design lack efficient methods and spatial reference systems that accommodate both cultural and regulating ecosystem services. Future research efforts should be directed to further advancing the spatial reference systems, the use of participatory mapping and landscape visualizations tools for cultural ecosystem services and the elaboration of landscape design principles.

The paper presents a method of analysis and design of urban landscapes called PlaceMaker. The method is intended as a key resource for assessing the identity of places and measures for its enhancement, reconstruction and design. By using different tools for analysis and interpretation of places and questionnaires administered to their users, PlaceMaker finds the identity material that the city has available and how to de-compose and re-compose it for its sustainable project transformation. Pedestrian-intensive areas, in particular urban, cultural and historical poles of attraction, increasingly bear the imprint of globalization, conveying messages which have developed in an uncontrolled manner and are aimed at conveying their users' patterns of thought and action. The presence of a dense mixture of contrasting elements and perceptions can detract from the image of a city. As regards, the paper is completed with a synopsis of the experiment carried out in an historic axe in London - Oxford Street - where globalization is in danger of levelling out the beauty of the area in favour of widespread genericity

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems monitor and control electric power distribution. Recent history has shown that cyber-attacks pose a tremendous risk for the economy and safety of modern countries. This paper introduces an architecture and a prototype implementation for a process-aware, network-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to secure control networks in the domain of power distribution. Based on a recently proposed process model, the system continuously assesses the local physical process and all control commands with regard to consistency and safety of the underlying physical process. Its detection capabilities focus on process-based attacks like manipulated control commands, which appear legitimate to traditional IDS but might nevertheless have devastating effects on the power distribution. The architecture separates the evaluation part from the traffic processing, which ensures extensibility and scalability. The developed implementation has been successfully deployed at a Dutch power distribution substation. Its detection performance is characterized by a very low miss rate and high precision.

In the present paper design, realization and testing of a novel small scale adsorption refrigerator prototype based on activated carbon/ethanol working pair is described. Firstly, experimental activity has been carried out for identification of the best performing activated carbon available on the market, through the evaluation of the achievable thermodynamic performance both under air conditioning and refrigeration conditions. Once identified the best performing activated carbon, the design of the adsorber was developed by experimental dynamic performance analysis, carried out by means of the Gravimetric-Large Temperature Jump (G-LTJ) apparatus available at CNR ITAE lab. Finally, the whole 0.5 kW refrigerator prototype was designed and built. First experimental results both under reference air conditioning and refrigeration cycles have been reported, to check the achievable performance. High Specific Cooling Powers (SCPs), 95 W/kg and 50 W/kg, for air conditioning and refrigeration respectively, were obtained, while the COP ranged between 0.09 and 0.11, thus showing an improvement of the current state of the art.

Artículos en revistas Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMI) represent one of the first steps in the Smart Grid process, where Power Line Communication (PLC) is emerging as the most costeffective solution since it allows reusing electric infrastructures as communication channel. However, the performance of this technology is highly affected by the characteristics of the existing distribution network. This article presents a thorough sensitivity analysis to assess the operating limits of smart metering applications for multiple representative configurations of low voltage (LV) networks based on a PLC simulation framework that integrates DLMS/COSEM and PRIME standards. The number of registered nodes and the time to read all meters have been defined as Key Performance Indicators to assess the communication performance. The conclusions drawn from this study provide useful information for the integration of smart meter applications that take advantage of AMI under different local conditions. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Artículos en revistas Energy transportation costs typically make up a quarter of consumers? electricity bills, and most of this amount (90% in the United Kingdom, 75% in Brazil and Spain, and 60% in India, for example) is due to energy transportation through the distribution network. This cost could escalate over the next few decades as distributed energy resources are expected to grow substantially in response to the financial incentives many governments have created for renewable and efficient generation to meet their CO2 reduction targets. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Organic photovoltaics (OPV) have developed into a vast research area. Progress in various directions has made it difficult to monitor the technology's precise development state. We offer a patent landscape analysis over all OPV devices, their substrates and encapsulation materials to provide an overview of patenting activity from a historical, organizational, geographical and technological point of view. Such an exercise is instrumental for private companies and research institutes aiming at both internal or external technology creation. We discuss our findings in the context of the Industrial Life Cycle model and find OPV still residing in the fluid technology development phase. Technology development is still following an exponential growth path, with the majority of patents coming from the Asian continent and in general private companies. For devices, the main technological focus can be traced back to the " H01L-031" international patent classification (IPC) main group. For the queried substrates, the most attention has gone to glass, but paper and textile have drawn significant interest too. Finally, encapsulation is found to be a less mature research field given the smaller number of patent families. The latter shows that the technology has not matured to the level where processing is carried out on a commercial scale

The main performance characteristics of the turbine, descriptions of the electrohydraulic control and protection system (EHCPS), the heat flow diagram, arrangement decisions, and motivation for selecting them, are given. The steam turbine presented by the Ural Turbine Works (UTW) is intended for replacing the VPT-25 turbine the service life of which has already expired at the Novokuybyshevsk CHP plant. The mixed-pressure turbine will operate in combination of the double-circuit heat recovery boiler (HRB) in a parallel scheme. High-pressure (HP) steam will be supplied from the main steam header to which high-pressure steam from the power boilers and the HRB will be fed, while low-pressure (LP) steam will be supplied directly from the HRB. For the turbine, nozzle steam distribution and the two-row control stage are adopted. The turbine has a process steam extraction line with its stop and control valve and heating steam extraction line leading to the main steam collector.