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Fantastic Architecture and the Building of Europe in Valerio Evangelisti's Eymerich Fiction
No full textConcomitant with the horizontal expansion of EU territory through physical and political enlargement is a genealogy narrative, which emphasizes the ostensible roots of Europeanness in classical antiquity and Christianity. In the face of this sanitized genealogy, which lies at the heart of the European constitutional project, a range of alternative and more inclusive narratives circulate in contemporary European popular fiction. This paper focuses on a series of fantasy novels by the Italian author Valerio Evangelisti, featuring Inquisitor Eymerich as hero-investigator. In his highly popular novels, Evangelisti seeks to uncover layers of shared historical memory untainted with post-Enlightenment rhetoric.
The central architectural tropes of Evangelisti’s imaginary world are those of a castle and a convent, epitomizing the temporal and sacral power in European history. Each isolated from its outside environment and built on layer upon layer of subterranean chambers and corridors, the castle and the convent conceal a past quite different from the one championed in the official European genealogy. Memories of pagan worship and Islamic or Judaic learning – banished from the official rhetoric – continue to thrive, dark and threatening, in the subterranean strata of Evangelisti’s European edifice. Evangelisti thus provides an incisive critique of the official European story of origin, which threatens to suppress any alternative visions of European history or unorthodox avenues for European identity formation
Complexity and robustness of frame structures
No full textRobustness is a prerequisite in the design of a structure and represent a modern research topic in the field of structural engineering. Many definitions have been given to this concept; many design codes focuses the attention on avoiding disproportionation between cause and effect. Lind introduced the concept of “damage tolerance” as the capacity of the system to be able to sustain some damage without failure.
Frames structures are considered as a case study of damage tolerance. The peculiarity of these schemes is the presence of a high degree of static indeterminacy, which makes the structures able to differentiate the load paths from the elevation to the foundation. In this framework, the analysis of the topology of the elements of the scheme is performed. For this purpose, a novel metric for “structural complexity” is presented. Information theory is used for the analysis of predominant mechanisms in the transfer of loads from the elevation nodes to the foundations through the set of elements of the frame. The generation of the fundamental static determinate mechanisms, similar to the load paths, is performed by means of algebraic graph theoretical concepts.
Then, the effects on the whole structure of the removal of a single element of the frame are highlighted and discussed. The removal on the element is governed by a damage parameter, which reduces the stiffness of the element. Since a general behaviour is sought, a linear elastic model is used. At the end, some general considerations on the robustness of the structures with respect to the so called “black swan events” are drawn
A damaged non-homogeneous Timoshenko beam model for a dam subjected to aging effects
No full textA hemi-variational formulation for a damaged non-homogeneous Timoshenko beam is proposed here for the purpose of fast simulation of the properties of a dam. The dam is therefore modeled as a damaged non-homogeneous Timoshenko beam embedded in 2D space. The damage evolution and the mechanics of the beam are governed both by the hemi- variational principle and by the assumption on the form of the deformation energy functional, that comprehends the dissipative part owing to damage-aging effects. In the formulation, the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) condition is derived and the damage, which locally decreases the stiffness (i.e., axial, bending, and shear stiffness) of the beam, becomes rele- vant once a measure of the elastic energy, called the normalized undamaged elastic energy, reaches a certain threshold that is constitutively prescribed ab initio. The aging effect is assumed by reducing such a threshold in the neighborhood of the bottom of the beam, where the concentration of the chemical and physical attacks is higher. As a result, we show a method for the calculation of the mechanical failure condition. In addition, we observe that, even though this threshold is assumed to decrease in a large region far from the bottom of the dam, the damage is confined at the bottom of it. Thus, we have proved that the trapezoidal shape that is used in the dam design is useful not only to decrease the state of stress in the elastic regime, but also to confine the effects of damage evolution owing to the aging effects
Hermann Kant. Ein bio- bibliografisches Profil
No full textThe proximity to the power apparatus has cast dark shadows on the literary work of Hermann Kant, who is regarded as one of the most read authors of the GDR. Valerio Furneri embeds Kant's life and work in the all-German context of the 20th century and reinterprets his classics such as Die Aula or Der Aufenthalt. The author does not pursue the claim to rehabilitate the GDR, nor to trivialise Kant's role in it. Instead, the attempt is made to look at Kant's entire work from a temporal distance and to re-evaluate it. Through his works, Kant was able to accompany and depict not only the German-German history, but also European history.Die Nähe zum Machtapparat hat dunkle Schatten auf das literarische Werk von Hermann Kant, der als meistgelesener Schriftsteller der DDR gilt, geworfen. Valerio Furneri bettet Kants Leben und Werk in den gesamtdeutschen Kontext des 20. Jahrhunderts ein und interpretiert vor diesem Hintergrund Klassiker wie Die Aula oder Der Aufenthalt neu. Der Autor verfolgt dabei weder den Anspruch, die DDR zu rehabilitieren, noch Kants Rolle darin kleinzureden. Stattdessen wird der Versuch unternommen, Kants Gesamtwerk aus zeitlicher Distanz zu betrachten und neu zu bewerten. Durch seine Werke gelang es Kant nämlich nicht nur die deutsch-deutsche, sondern auch die europäische Geschichte zu begleiten und abzubilden
A novel structural resilience index: definition and applications to frame structures
No full textResilience is the ability to undergo disruptive events without suffering complete failure and minimizing undesirable consequences thereof. Many attempts have been done in the recent literature in order to define quantitatively synthetic resilience measures of mechanical structures. They have been conceived as to be useful in comparing and classifying the resilience of different structures. In this paper we propose a novel rational and deterministic structural resilience index, based on a worst-case disruptive event, and making use of a minimalistic kinematics-based mechanical description. Particular emphasis is given to the computation of such a new structural resilience index for a generic frame structure, it being possible without the use of automated algorithms and an analytic expression of it has been achieved in terms of the numbers of ports (modules) and floors. First of all, keeping fixed the number of modules, the resilience index decreases as the number of floors increases. Secondly, keeping fixed the number of floors, the resilience index increases as the number modules increases. Finally, we notice that the case with infinite floors has a lower resilience index with respect to case of infinite modules, which is, as expectable, more resilient
Hermann Kant. Ein bio- bibliografisches Profil
No full textThe proximity to the power apparatus has cast dark shadows on the literary work of Hermann Kant, who is regarded as one of the most read authors of the GDR. Valerio Furneri embeds Kant's life and work in the all-German context of the 20th century and reinterprets his classics such as Die Aula or Der Aufenthalt. The author does not pursue the claim to rehabilitate the GDR, nor to trivialise Kant's role in it. Instead, the attempt is made to look at Kant's entire work from a temporal distance and to re-evaluate it. Through his works, Kant was able to accompany and depict not only the German-German history, but also European history.Die Nähe zum Machtapparat hat dunkle Schatten auf das literarische Werk von Hermann Kant, der als meistgelesener Schriftsteller der DDR gilt, geworfen. Valerio Furneri bettet Kants Leben und Werk in den gesamtdeutschen Kontext des 20. Jahrhunderts ein und interpretiert vor diesem Hintergrund Klassiker wie Die Aula oder Der Aufenthalt neu. Der Autor verfolgt dabei weder den Anspruch, die DDR zu rehabilitieren, noch Kants Rolle darin kleinzureden. Stattdessen wird der Versuch unternommen, Kants Gesamtwerk aus zeitlicher Distanz zu betrachten und neu zu bewerten. Durch seine Werke gelang es Kant nämlich nicht nur die deutsch-deutsche, sondern auch die europäische Geschichte zu begleiten und abzubilden
Special issue: Process safety in times of a pandemic
No full textGreen Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Safety and Security Scienc
The intentionality of matter: the personal character of nature in Edith Stein's "Potency and act"
No full textIn the closing chapter, Francesco Valerio Tommasi elaborates upon the analogy between person and nature in Stein. As he emphasizes, Stein attributes to nature an objectively spiritual dimension, a hidden form of intentionality. As the author suggests, for Stein nature turns out to be a living sign of the spirit—thus, a sign expressing spiritual values, such as emotions. This perspective is present in both the lectures on The Constitution of the Human Person and Potency and Act: the phenomenological reflection on personhood is combined, Tommasi argues, with a Thomist view that brings Stein to conceiving the life of the entire cosmos as a spirit (or act) informing it and shaping it into a living sign of the creation
Lignin‐Derived Sustainable Nano‐Platforms: A Multifunctional Solution for an Efficient Dye Removal
No full text: In contrast to conventional non-biobased adsorbents, lignin emerges as a cost-effective and environmentally benign alternative for water treatment. This study identifies unexpected and unpredicted multifunctional properties of lignin nanoparticles (LNPs). LNPs, which are prepared by simple physical processes, demonstrated for the first time to behave as multifunctional materials able to adsorb and photodegrade methylene blue (MB) in aqueous medium upon UV irradiation. Furthermore, the synthetic approach adopted to synthesize LNPs - and therefore their surface properties - strongly affects their performances. More specifically, LNPs obtained by solvent-antisolvent nanoprecipitation (SLNPs) show the highest MB adsorption properties (98 % removal), reaching a maximum adsorption capacity of 43.0 mg g-1, and the fastest adsorption kinetics with respect to other lignin-based adsorbents. Conversely, hydrotropic LNPs (HLNPs) exhibit exceptional photocatalytic activity, resulting in 98 % MB degradation over 6 hours of UV irradiation, combined with the ability to be easily recycled and reused. The present effort paves the way for the use of LNPs as efficient multifunctional materials able to perform concurrently adsorption and photocatalytic degradation of dye pollutants, toward the creation of a sustainable biobased water treatment platform
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