Archivio della ricerca della Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
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Development of Oil-Free Lubricants for Cold Rolling of Low-Carbon Steel †
Get PDFOil-in-water emulsions (O/W emulsions) are generally used to lubricate the cold rolling process of low-carbon steel. In addition to the obvious advantages of efficient lubrication and cooling of the process, there are also some disadvantages, mainly related to emulsion bath maintenance, subsequent production steps and waste disposal. In some application areas, Oil-Free Lubricants (OFL’s) have been shown to be at least equally effective in decreasing friction and wear as conventional oil-based lubricants, while resulting in benefits related to waste disposal. In 2023, a project named “Transfer of aqueous oil free lubricants into steel cold rolling practice” (acronym ‘RollOilFreeII’) began, with it receiving funding from the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS). This project aims at an industrial application of Oil-Free Lubricants in the steel cold rolling process. The project builds on the work of the ‘RollOilFree’ project (also carried out in the RFCS-framework). This article briefly recapitulates the findings in the RollOilFree project and describes the objectives, benefits, activities and first results of the RollOilFreeII project. Notably, a pilot mill trial at high speed has been carried out, showing a good performance of the investigated OFLs. Back-calculated friction values were equal to, or even slightly lower than, reference O/W emulsions. The strip cleanliness with OFLs is much better than it is with the reference O/W emulsions. Only for a very thin product, as is the case in tinplate rolling, does the direct application of a conventional O/W dispersion (a high-particle-sized O/W emulsion) give a better performance than the investigated OFLs. Further development of OFLs should focus on this aspect
Ambrisentan Retains Its Pro-Autophagic Activity on Human Pulmonary Artery Endothelial Cells Exposed to Hypoxia in an In Vitro Model Mimicking Diabetes
Get PDFCardiovascular comorbidities are associated with reduced treatment response in group 1 pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). This may result from misdiagnosis of group 2 PH, but it can also be explained as the loss of ability of pulmonary endothelial cells to respond to specific antiremodeling drugs. We evaluated the effects of high glucose (HG) and hyperosmolar stress (high mannitol, HM) on the response of human pulmonary artery endothelial cells (hPAECs) to ambrisentan (AMB), focusing on autophagy, viability, apoptosis and several microRNAs involved in pulmonary arterial remodelling. hPAECs were incubated with 30.5 mM HG or 25 mM HM, with/without 0.02 nM AMB in normoxia (Nx) or hypoxia (Hx) for 24 h. Hx reduced cell survival (p = 0.03) and autophagy (p = 0.02), an effect mimicked by HG and HM only in Nx. In Nx and Hx, AMB reverted the effect of HG, but not HM on autophagy, almost completely or partially, respectively. Compared to Nx, Hx increased the antiapoptotic miR124-3p in vehicle-treated hPAEC (p = 0.002), and induced an opposite effect on antiapoptotic and proliferative miR191-3p. In Nx, AMB induced miR124-3p in HG- (p = 0.04 vs. HG+A_Nx) and HM-treated (p < 0.0001 vs. HM+AMB_Nx) hPAECs, and miR191-3p in HM-treated hPAECs (p = 0.03). In H, A induced a similar effect on miR124-3p in hPAEC exposed to AMB+HM (p = 0.02). In hPAEC exposed to Hx, AMB retains its pro-autophagic effects in an in vitro model mimicking diabetes. miR124-3p and, to a lesser extent, miR191-3p may act as biomarkers of disease and treatment response to specific drugs in patients with PAH and diabetes
Please mind the gap between guidelines & behavior change: A systematic review and a consideration on effectiveness in healthcare
Get PDFBackground & Objective: This systematic review evaluates the impact of guidelines on healthcare professionals’
behavior and explores the resulting outcomes.
Methods: Using PRISMA methodology, Scopus and Web of Science databases were searched, yielding 624 results.
After applying inclusion criteria, 67 articles were selected for in-depth analysis.
Results: The studies focused on key clusters: Target behaviors, Effectiveness, Research designs, Behavioral
frameworks, and Publication outlets. Prescription behavior was the most studied (58.2 %), followed by other
health-related behaviors (31.3 %) and hygiene practices (10.4 %). Significant behavior changes were reported in
46.3 % of studies, with 17.9 % showing negative effects, and 22.4 % reporting mixed results. Quantitative
methods dominated (56.8 %), while qualitative methods (19.4 %) and review designs (13.4 %) were less common.
Theoretical Domain Framework (TDF) and Behavior Change Wheel (BCW) were frequently used frameworks,
with the UK and the USA contributing most studies. Medical doctors (44.8 %) were the primary
participants, followed by general healthcare providers (37.3 %).
Conclusions: The study highlights the varied effectiveness of guidelines, with prescription behavior being the
most investigated. Guidelines influenced behavior positively in less than half of the cases, and doctors were the
primary focus, rather than nurses. The complexity of interventions suggests a need for further research to develop
more effective behavioral interventions and to standardize methodological approaches to reduce clinical variation
in healthcare
Selective state models are what you need for animal action recognition
Get PDFRecognizing animal actions provides valuable insights into animal welfare, yielding crucial information for agricultural, ethological, and neuroscientific research. While video-based action recognition models have been applied to this task, current approaches often rely on computationally intensive Transformer layers, limiting their practical application in field settings such as farms and wildlife reserves. This study introduces Mamba-MSQNet, a novel architecture family for multilabel Animal Action Recognition using Selective Space Models. By transforming the state-of-the-art MSQNet model with Mamba blocks, we achieve significant reductions in computational requirements: up to 90% fewer Floating point OPerations and 78% fewer parameters compared to MSQNet. These optimizations not only make the model more efficient but also enable it to outperform Transformer-based counterparts on the Animal Kingdom dataset, achieving a mean Average Precision of 74.6, marking an improvement over previous architectures. This combination of enhanced efficiency and improved performance represents a significant advancement in the field of animal action recognition. The dramatic reduction in computational demands, coupled with a performance boost, opens new possibilities for real-time animal behavior monitoring in resource-constrained environments. This enhanced efficiency could revolutionize how we observe and analyze animal behavior, potentially leading to breakthroughs in animal welfare assessment, behavioral studies, and conservation efforts
Boosting circular economy solutions in the construction sector using a life cycle assessment
Get PDFConstruction and demolition waste (CDW) management activities have had wide-ranging adverse impacts on the Earth's climate. Addressing the problems of construction and demolition waste production requires a comprehensive and multifaceted approach and specific attention to the development of sustainable circular on-site practices. This study compares recycled products against conventional products already available on the market. This study applied a life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate the benefits of secondary raw material (SRM)-based products compared to conventional virgin raw materials. Focusing on a Spanish case study that had foreseen the revitalization of a degraded area, the construction of a small utility building, and road construction, this analysis also assessed the overall environmental footprint of the overall construction work. The results showed that, despite the impact savings achieved by opting for SRM-based products rather than conventional solutions, the production stages still have the greatest impact on the scale of construction, with the sole exception of the construction of small facilities where the construction itself was the largest contributor. Climate change; water scarcity; freshwater eutrophication; resource use, energy carriers; and resource use, minerals and metals were the most significant impact categories both in the analysis of the construction products and the overall construction work. An LCA is vital in the construction and demolition sector because it provides a holistic understanding of the environmental impacts associated with the different stages of a project's life cycle fostering the implementation of circular on-site practices
Comparative Test of Novel Fluorescent Optical Antennas for LED- and Laser-Based Optical Wireless Communications
Get PDFFluorescent Concentrators (FCs) are set to revolutionize Optical Wireless
Communications (OWC), offering significant advantages over traditional
receivers, such as large Field of View (FoV) and enhanced optical gain (OG).
In this study, three different Optical Antennas are presented and evaluated as
OWC receivers, exploiting FCs incorporating different fluorophores. The
performances of DQ1 and Lumogen Red 305F (LR305), and a newly
synthesized fluorophore (H2) are comparatively tested for solar energy
harvesting, never proposed before for OWC. The devices are tested in high bit
rate, laser-based OWC configuration, and for indoor LED-based Visible Light
Communication (VLC) by presenting a realistic indoor VLC
transmitter-receiver (TX-RX) system embedding high-power white LEDs as
transmitter. The results demonstrate that all the proposed OAs exhibit greater
angular stability than traditional detectors, potentially offering greater
resilience to misalignment and beam wandering effects, particularly relevant
also in Free Space Optical (FSO) configurations. Furthermore, the intrinsic
properties of H2 and LR305 make them particularly suited for white-light VLC
applications. Based on a thorough experimental characterization, the work is
the first to propose and evaluate in detail the performance of various new
OAs, depending on the specific application, highlighting the efficiency of such
devices across various OWC fields
D. Amram, I diritti digitali del minore di età, in Diritto Minorile. Orientamenti giurisprudenziali e processuali, a cura di Alessandra Cagnazzo, Giuffré LF, p. 649-662
No full textData-Driven Ecosystems: Competition Law as a Way to Link Sustainability and Digitalisation
No full textTechnology valorisation in public and private organisations: exploring Open Innovation practices in Proof-of-Concept (PoC) programs
No full textWe explore how Proof-of-Concept (PoC) programs, as Open Innovation (OI) instruments, are implemented differently by public and private organisations in technology valorisation processes. PoC programs, traditionally employed in public institutions, are also gaining relevance in private companies to reduce uncertainty and increase market readiness of early-stage technologies. Through a multiple case study of 12 PoC programs, in this research, we compare their implementation in universities, national research centres, firms, and venture funds. We contribute to the OI and technology transfer literature by proposing four distinct PoC models and discussing how they facilitate OI practices differently across sectors
Merging textual and numerical databases: a steppingstone for statistical analyses of illegal events
Get PDFThis paper aims to define a methodological path—merging judgments and official statisti- cal data—to organize complete, objective, and reliable data in a database, thus simplifying the analysis of illegal social phenomena. Judiciary judgments are a new data source: they deal with illegal events that describe social phenomena—even if they are only the "illegal" ones—and contain objective and reliable data and information. Judiciary judgments are also texts, so the first step is a statistical textual analysis and text mining techniques to discover information and organize it in a statistical database. The final database is obtained by integrating numerical data from other information sources. It therefore has statistical properties such as reliability, completeness and updating. Subsequent statistical analyses or modelling are then possible based on the entire set or subsets of data adequately extracted from the implemented statistical database. We present some results obtained from judg- ments about corruption in order to demonstrate the advantages of linking textual data- bases (textual analyses on judgments) and numerical databases (from ISTAT). The pro- posed methodology can benefit different stakeholders, such as researchers, policymakers, and other enforcement actors. It is independent of the specific software used and remains valid when applied to other illegal activities (e.g., organized crime, tax crime, and money laundering). Furthemore, the results may be even more effective if the institutional actors involved have access to judgments at all levels, thus overcoming potential privacy con- cerns. The methodology could also be used to support evidence-based policy in the fight against crime and illegal activities