• Energy Research
• 7. Clean energy close
• 6. Clean water close
• Italian close
• CNR ExploRA close

The focus of this work is to outline the actions that in the next years, at international and national level, will be implemented as a tool to contrast climate change and reduce the contribution of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These actions go through an important transformation of the energy sector, with the progressive decrease in the use of fossil fuels for the energy production, starting with coal which is the most polluting. This conversion process can represent a possibility of a technological renewal of the current plants operating in Italy and an opportunity for an employment growth with reference to the construction of the new plants and to the decommissioning of the existing plants which will close in the future.

This work was carried out by a consortium of agencies and research institutes, in order to obtain indications on water demand and adaptation of irrigation management of important Italian crops in the coming decades, in the light of climatic scenarios provided by the Agroscenari project. The main results obtained regard integration and improvement of the Criteria crop water balance model and its use to evaluate future irrigation needs of crops like permanent meadows, maize, wheat, tomato, kiwifruit and citrus crops in diverse northern and southern Italy environments. We also developed and implemented an example of "climate service" for early crop classification and seasonal summer irrigation need forecasting in Emilia-Romagna.

The actual panorama of fishing industry is very problematic due to the contemporary action of many factors. Overfishing and the actual economic crisis affect revenues, while the obsolescence of existing fishing vessels which causes high fuel consumption, combined with the continuous rise up of the fuel price increase management costs. So that, for many fishermen there is no profitability at the moment. Due to the impossibility to have influence on the market, fishermen can only try to reduce management costs of their activities, mainly related to the fuel cost and consumption. Actually there is no possibility to replace fishing fleets with new and more efficient constructions due to last European Commission regulations. Fishermen must reduce fuel consumption only by reducing fishing vessels energy usage. The total amount of energy used by a fishing vessel will vary depend on the size (and engineering) of the vessel, weather conditions, type and size of fishing gears, location, skill and knowledge. Furthermore, similar fishing vessels could have different energy usage, due to different engineering solutions such as different hull design and propulsion systems, different propeller type and size, different techniques and tactics. To achieve energy saving on existing fishing vessels a methodological approach is necessary. First of all, it is necessary to define the energy profile of the vessel. Once the energy profile is defined it is possible to state how energy (and the fuel) is used and heavy energy users can be identified. For these energy users technological improvements can be discussed and solution proposed; these solutions must be evaluated also from an economical point of view with a business plan, taking into account economical savings and investment costs. The energetic profile is defined trough an Energy Audit, an engineering test for the monitoring of energy usage during normal fishing activities. An Energy Audit template was conceived and applied to some fishing vessels. The main goal is to define the energetic profiles of the Center Adriatic fishing fleet as a baseline for further analysis, aimed mainly to find and evaluate improvements.

Testing and performance evaluation of piezoelectric devices for energy harvesting from vibrations are tasks of great relevance for the development of these devices. Thus, the definition of a test methodology that satisfies these goals is a preliminary requirement of this research activity. Because of the electro-mechanical nature of these devices, the preparation of the experimental set-up involves a multidisciplinary approach which includes mechanical and electrical measurements. Therefore, in this technical report, the development of an experimental methodology for testing these systems is proposed with reference to a specific set-up so as to clarify some aspects, including the choice of suitable instrumentation for the purpose.