1,057 research outputs found
Agricura: una pratica di ecopsicologia, terapia outdoor e Horticultural Therapy
No full textL’agricura affronta diverse forme di disagio mentale. Essendo una terapia corporea non separa mente e corpo, qualità della vita e salute, vita indipendente e autonomia psicologica, terapia ed economia. L’attività economica di un’impresa sociale è il contesto necessario per la pratica dell’agricura. La prospettiva olistica non sminuisce però la drammaticità della patologia mentale che va conosciuta e analizzata con conoscenza e competenza. L’approccio terapeutico rimane centrale in agricura. Gli effetti della cura devono essere sempre empiricamente documentati.
L’agricoltura, che diventa cura ecologica, offre innanzitutto un’oasi di pace e di armonia soprattutto per chi soffre di disagi mentali pesanti o anche devastanti. Con la natura, innanzitutto, si sta bene. La seduta terapeutica riprende e rende espliciti i vissuti di benessere che i pazienti hanno sperimentato.
L’infant research, la psicologia e la scienza cognitiva dell’età evolutiva (Daniel Stern, Colwyn Trevarthen, Ed Tronick, tra gli altri) hanno innovato in profondità ed estensione la conoscenza della vita pre-natale e della prima infanzia. La psicologia, le neuroscienze, la sociologia e l’antropologia convergono nel sostenere che per capire ciò che chiamiamo mente, pensiero, coscienza, si deve partire dal corpo. Un corpo che finché è vivo è sempre in movimento.
Il cervello sensomotorio e affettivo si attiva non solo quando agiamo o proviamo delle emozioni e delle sensazioni, ma anche quando le vediamo negli altri, le immaginiamo o le vediamo rappresentate (virtualmente). Come sostenuto in questa ricerca, l’Io proviene dal Noi, ci pensiamo come individui ma in realtà siamo “condividui” (V. Gallese). Come è evidente nella simulazione incarnata, la comunanza con l’altro precede e fonda la differenza. La natura corporea, infatti, impara ad esprimersi, fin dai primi giorni, creando abitudini e ritualità. La dimensione sociale è costitutiva dell’umano. Le pratiche sociali cambiano l’intelligenza corporea e viceversa. Agricura è intesa come pratica sociale perché si svolge nella cornice di un’impresa agricola e numerose metafore si svolgono in una scena sociale. La triade: paziente, tutor agricolo e terapeuta richiama la triplice dimensione dell’agricura: cura, lavoro, ecologia umana.
La scoperta dei neuroni specchio e lo studio neuronale dei meccanismi di rispecchiamento e di simulazione hanno dato un fondamento neurofisiologico all’empatia (il “sentire dentro” l’altro) che rimane però un’attitudine umana perché presuppone la libera scelta. Nell’empatia si attribuisce un senso all’Altro, si decide se usare la competenza empatica per instaurare un legame o per manipolare o colpire l’altro.
L’agricura vorrebbe estendere un certo grado di empatia anche verso la vita vegetale. Questa possibilità è il fondamento della metafora terapeutica. Oltre l’empatia c’è anche la parola: la comunicazione del tutor agricolo spiega l’azione, la parola del terapeuta illustra la metafora prima dell’atelier, interviene con brevi rimandi durante l’atelier e sviluppa il riferimento terapeutico nella seduta successiva. Il paziente costruisce con il suo linguaggio la Narrazione Metaforica. Nell’agricura quindi la parola è il punto di partenza e di arrivo per indicare cosa significhi l’umano. La parola creativa della Narrazione Metaforica sviluppa le potenzialità creative dei pazienti e li proietta oltre il conosciuto, preparando il cambiamento terapeutico.Agricura addresses different forms of mental distress. Being a body therapy, it does not separate mind and body, quality of life and health, independent living and psychological autonomy, therapy and economy. The economic activity of a social enterprise is the necessary context for the practice of Agricura. The holistic perspective does not diminish the drama of mental pathology, which must be known and analyzed with knowledge and competence. The therapeutic approach remains central in agricare. The effects of treatment must always be empirically documented.
Agriculture, which becomes ecological care, offers first of all an oasis of peace and harmony, especially for those who suffer from severe or even devastating mental distress. With nature, first of all, one feels good. The therapeutic session resumes and makes explicit the experiences of well-being that patients have experienced.
Infant research, psychology and cognitive science of developmental age have innovated in depth and extent the knowledge of prenatal life and early childhood. Psychology, neuroscience, sociology and anthropology converge in supporting the idea that to understand what we call mind, thought, consciousness, we must start from the body. A body that is always in motion as long as it is alive. The sensorimotor and affective brain is activated not only when we act or experience emotions and sensations, but also when we see them in others, imagine them or see them represented (virtually). As supported in this research, the I comes from the We, we think of ourselves as individuals but in reality we are “share-individuals” (V. Gallese). As is evident in embodied simulation, the commonality with the other precedes and establishes the difference. The corporeal nature, in fact, learns to express itself, from the first days, creating habits and rituals. The social dimension is constitutive of the human. Social practices change bodily intelligence and vice versa. Agricura is understood as a social practice because it takes place in the context of an agricultural enterprise and numerous metaphors take place in a social scene. The triad: patient, agricultural tutor and therapist recalls the triple dimension of agricura: care, work, human ecology.
The discovery of mirror neurons and the neuronal study of mirroring and simulation mechanisms have given a neurophysiological foundation to empathy (the “feeling inside” the other) which however remains a human attitude because it presupposes free choice. In empathy, a meaning is attributed to the Other, one decides whether to use empathic competence to establish a bond or to manipulate or strike the other.
Agricura would like to extend a certain degree of empathy also towards plant life. This possibility is the foundation of the therapeutic metaphor. Beyond empathy there is also the word: the communication of the agricultural tutor explains the action, the word of the therapist illustrates the metaphor before the atelier, intervenes with short references during the atelier and develops the therapeutic reference in the following session. The patient builds the Metaphorical Narration with his language. In Agricura therefore the word is the starting and finishing point to indicate what the human means. The creative word of the Metaphorical Narration develops the creative potential of the patients and projects them beyond the known, preparing the therapeutic change
The Use of CFD for the Design and Development of Innovative Configurations in Regenerative Glass Production Furnaces
No full textThe limitation of nitrogen oxides emissions is nowadays a challenge in several engineering fields. Recent European regulations have reduced the maximum NOx emissions and therefore forced the glass production sector to develop emission reduction strategies. Two different systems have been developed within the framework of the European LIFE project and are currently applied to glass regenerative furnaces: the Waste Gas Recirculation (WGR) and the Hybrid Air Staging (HyAS). The above systems are primary NOx reduction strategies because they both operate to control the combustion evolution. Both WGR and HyAS systems have been conceived with the extensive use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models: design strategies for both systems have been developed based on the use of CFD and are currently under use by glass furnace designers. In the present work, the CFD procedures routinely used for the design of the above systems are described. The systems effectiveness, due to the harsh conditions in the industrial installation, can be tested with oxygen concentration measurements inside the regenerators. The oxygen concentration is correlated to the flame evolution and therefore to the nitrogen oxides formation. For the above reason, the models have been validated with experimental data from pilot furnaces using measured values of O2 mole fraction. The CFD procedures are described in the paper together with their application to different configurations
The Use of Uncertainty Quantification and Numerical Optimization to Support the Design and Operation Management of Air-Staging Gas Recirculation Strategies in Glass Furnaces
No full textThe reduction in energy consumption and the increasingly demanding emissions regulations have become strategic challenges for every industrial sector. In this context, the glass industry would be one of the most affected sectors due to its high energy demand and emissions productions, especially in terms of NOx. For this reason, various emission abatement systems have been developed in this field and one of the most used is the air staging system. It consists in injecting air into the upper part of the regenerative chamber on the exhaust gases side in order to create the conditions for combustion that reduces NOx emissions. In this work, the combined use of CFD with data analysis techniques offers a tool for the design and management of a hybrid air staging system. Surrogate models of the bypass mass flow rate and uniformity index in the regenerative chamber have been obtained starting from DoE based on different simulations by varying the air mass flow rate of the two injectors located in a bypass duct that connects the two regenerative chambers. This model allows a UQ analysis to verify how the uncertainty of the air injectors can affect the bypass mass flow rate. Finally, an optimization procedure has identified the optimal condition for the best bypass mass flow rates and uniformity of the oxygen concentration in the chamber. High values of the mass flow rate of the pros injector and medium-low values for the cons injectors are identified as operating parameters for best conditions
Numerical Simulation of the Performance of a Twin Scroll Radial Turbine at Different Operating Conditions
No full textTwin scroll radial turbines are increasingly used for turbocharging applications, to take advantage of the pulsating exhaust gases. In spite of its relevance in turbocharging techniques, scientific literature about CFD applied to twin scroll turbines is limited, especially in case of partial admission. In the present paper a CFD complete model of a twin scroll radial turbine is developed in order to give a contribution to literature in understanding the capabilities of current industrial CFD approaches applied to these difficult cases and to develop performance index that can be used for turbine design optimization purposes. The flow solution is obtained by means of ANSYS CFX ® in a wide range of operating conditions in full and partial admission cases. The total-to-static efficiency and the mass flow parameter (MFP) have been calculated and compared with the experimental database in order to validate the numerical model. The purpose of the developed procedure is also to generate a database for twin scroll turbines useful for future applications. A comparison between performances obtained in different admission conditions was performed. In particular the analysis focused on the characterization of the flow at volute outlet/rotor inlet section. A flow distortion index at rotor inlet was introduced to correlate the turbine performance and the flow nonuniformities generated by the volute. Finally the influence of the backside cavity on the performance parameters is also discussed. The introduction of these new nonuniformity indices is proposed for volute design and optimization procedures
The pictorial wit of Domenico Tiepolo
No full textThis thesis takes a new approach to Domenico Tiepolo’s (1727-1804), Divertimento Per li Regazzi (c.1795-1804), it is arguably the artists most enigmatic graphic work, which features the commedia dell’arte character Pulcinella. The drawings have hitherto been subject to rigorous connoisseurial analysis. Indeed, in his introduction to ten of the drawings in a catalogue of Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings in The Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, James Byam Shaw states that this particular series of drawings has now become so famous ‘that it is hardly necessary to add to the literature of the series.’1 In my opinion it would be a great pity if future generations of scholars were discouraged by this remark, for I believe the drawings still have much to ‘tell’ the contemporary art historian and would further benefit from increasingly interpretative readings. Previously, scholars have regarded Domenico Tiepolo as an imitator of his father, Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), and interpreted the re-appropriation of motifs in the Divertimento as signs of old age and fatigue. I suggest, on the contrary, that in this series of drawings in particular, Domenico was an innovator.
This project carves out new territories within the study of the series in that it focuses on the playful nature of the drawings, and how the suite can be understood in relation to contemporary theory concerning games and play, and ludic musical/improvisatory forms. Additionally, the drawings are discussed as a case history in a now popular emerging dialectic on the late works of aged artists: here I consider how these drawings, often funny, poignant, sensitive and delicate reveal how the elderly painter reconciles himself not only to the passing of his own life and the extinction of his family line but to an entire political, cultural and visual tradition
Uncertainty Quantification Approach on Numerical Simulation for Supersonic Jets Performance
No full textOne of the main issues addressed in any engineering design problem is to predict the performance of the component or system as accurately and realistically as possible, taking into account the variability of operating conditions or the uncertainty on input data (boundary conditions or geometry tolerance). In this paper, the propagation of uncertainty on boundary conditions through a numerical model of supersonic nozzle is investigated. The evaluation of the statistics of the problem response functions is performed following ‘Surrogate-Based Uncertainty Quantification’. The approach involves: (a) the generation of a response surface starting from a DoE in order to approximate the convergent–divergent ‘physical’ model (expensive to simulate), (b) the application of the UQ technique based on the LHS to the meta-model. Probability Density Functions are introduced for the inlet boundary conditions in order to quantify their effects on the output nozzle performance. The physical problem considered is very relevant for the experimental tests on the UQ approach because of its high non-linearity. A small perturbation to the input data can drive the solution to a completely different output condition. The CFD simulations and the Uncertainty Quantification were performed by coupling the open source Dakota platform with the ANSYS Fluent® CFD commercial software: the process is automated through scripting. The procedure adopted in this work demonstrate the applicability of advanced simulation techniques (such as UQ analysis) to industrial technical problems. Moreover, the analysis highlights the practical use of the uncertainty quantification techniques in predicting the performance of a nozzle design affected by off-design conditions with fluid-dynamic complexity due to strong nonlinearity
Uncertainty Quantification Analysis of Exhaust Gas Plume in a Crosswind
No full textThe design of naval exhaust funnels has to take into account the interaction between the hot gases and topside structures, which usually includes critical electronic devices. Being able to predict the propagation trajectory, shape and temperature distribution of an exhaust gas plume is highly strategic in different industrial sectors. The propagation of a stack plume can be affected by different uncertainty factors, such as those related to the wind flow and gas flow conditions at the funnel exit. The constant growth of computational resources has allowed simulations to gain a key role in the early design phase. However, it is still difficult to model all the aspects of real physical problems in actual applications and, therefore, to completely rely upon the quantitative results of numerical simulations. One of the most important aspects is related to input variable uncertainty, which can significantly affect the simulation result. With this aim, the discipline of Uncertainty Quantification provides several methods to evaluate uncertainty propagation in numerical simulations. In this paper, UQ procedures are applied to a CFD simulation of a single plume in a crossflow. The authors test the influence of the uncertainty propagation of the chimney exit velocity and the main flow angle on the plume flow development. Two different UQ methods are applied to the analysis: the surrogate-based approach and the polynomial chaos expansion method. A comparison of the two methods is performed in order to find their pros and cons, focusing on the different and detailed quantities of interest
Transcending Giambologna: Domenico Pieratti and his experiments
No full textThe author maps out the career of Domenico Pieratti (Florence, 1600 - Rome, 1656), sheding light on this remarkable brilliant and highly original sculptor at the service of the Medici and Barberini
Strategies for the numerical modelling of regenerative pre-heating systems for recycled glass raw material
No full textDomenico Venier's Poetics and Petrarchism in Sixteenth-Century Veneto
No full textreservedIl presente elaborato si propone di indagare il fenomeno del petrarchismo cinquecentesco in area veneta, concentrandosi in particolare sulla figura di Domenico Venier, tra i più rappresentativi interpreti della lirica petrarchesca nel contesto veneziano del XVI secolo. Attraverso un’analisi delle principali istanze tematiche e stilistiche rintracciabili nella sua produzione poetica, la tesi intende delineare un profilo letterario dell’autore che tenga conto non solo della tradizione petrarchesca, ma anche delle caratteristiche culturali e sociali del contesto lagunare. Particolare attenzione è riservata al cenacolo venieriano, luogo privilegiato di scambio intellettuale e di sperimentazione poetica, che svolse un ruolo significativo nella diffusione e nella rielaborazione del canone lirico stabilito da Pietro Bembo nella prima metà del Cinquecento. La tesi prende inoltre in esame la ricezione critica della poesia di Venier, con l’obiettivo di ricostruire le diverse prospettive interpretative che hanno contribuito a delineare l’immagine letteraria del poeta nel corso dei secoli.This thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon of sixteenth-century Petrarchism in the Veneto region of Northern Italy, with a particular focus on the figure of Domenico Venier, one of the most prominent exponents of Petrarchan lyric poetry of the time. Through an analysis of the main thematic and stylistic features that characterize his poetic production, the study seeks to outline a literary profile of the author, considering not only the Petrarchan tradition but also the cultural and social characteristics of the Venetian context. Special attention is given to Venier’s social circle, a privileged space for intellectual exchange and poetic experimentation, which played a significant role in the dissemination and reworking of the lyric canon established by Pietro Bembo in the first half of the sixteenth century. The thesis also examines the critical reception of Venier’s poetry, aiming to reconstruct the various interpretative perspectives that have contributed to shaping the poet’s literary image throughout the centuries
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