1,721,011 research outputs found
Reliability assessment of FreeRTOS in Embedded Systems
Full text linkhis work studies the reliability of a FreeRTOS operating system when affected by Single Event Upset faults. The methodology is based on fault injection to target the most relevant variables and data structures. Results confirm the selectivity in the OS fault tolerance, paving the way to a tailored design of fault-tolerant mechanisms, such as selective hardening of the OS
“Fit to 55”: Financial Impacts of Italian Incentive Measures for the Efficiency of the Building Stock and the Revitalization of Fragile Areas
No full textStarting from the strategic initiative presented in 2020 by the European Commission and entitled “A wave of renovations for Europe: greening buildings, creating jobs and improving lives”, Member States are now committed to stepping up efforts to renovate their building stock, with the precise goal of achieving climate neutrality in 2050. With the aim of exploring the potential appeal of incentive measures, the paper started with some considerations on the use and ownership of the building stock in Italy, frequently with a lack of maintenance. The proposed method, set up in three successive steps, verifies (for a hypothetical owner) the procedural feasibility and the financial sustainability of a new recent measure of energy efficiency, the Superbonus 110%. The selected case study is a complex of three buildings, built between the sixties and seventies in response to the strong demand for second homes and located in a small mountain municipality in the North-West of Italy. The results showed that the intervention allows, on the one hand, energy efficiency and, on the other hand, the initial and long-term convenience for the owner. However, a common strategy is needed for such policies, which -if left to the actions of individuals- may counteract the current potential for territorial resilience that seems to stimulate, especially in fragile territories
Transitory master key transport layer security for WSNs
Full text linkSecurity approaches in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are normally based on symmetric cryptography. Instead of symmetric encryption, some alternative approaches have been developed by using public-key cryptography. However, the higher computational cost represents a hard limitation to their use. In this paper, a new key management protocol is proposed. A transitory symmetric key is used to authenticate nodes in the network during the key establishment. However, pairwise keys are established using asymmetric cryptography. A theoretical analysis shows that the computational effort required by the public key cryptosystem is greatly reduced, while the security of the network is increased with respect to state-of-the-art schemes based on a transitory master key. Moreover, an experimental analysis demonstrates that this proposed approach can reduce the time spent for key establishment by about 35%
Detection of Contaminated Hazelnuts under UV Illumination
No full textHazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) is one of the most important crops in the world. Due to its high nutritional composition and enhanced flavors, it is used in numerous confectioneries, baking, and chocolate industries. During various cultivation, harvesting, and storage phases, hazelnuts can be prone to bacterial and fungal infections which damage their nutritional values as well as result in bad odor and unpleasant taste. This work proposes a solution to detect rotten hazelnuts by means of Ultraviolet (UV) light. In order to uniformly illuminate hazelnut samples and to capture high-quality images, an axial illuminator is specially modeled and printed using a 3D-printer. The sample images are captured at 450 nm and 750 nm. The healthy and rotten hazelnuts behave differently in the presence of UV light, such that the healthy parts produce fluorescence after absorbing the UV light and appear brighter, whereas the rotten hazelnut samples do not produce any fluorescence and are therefore darker in the captured images. The two images are then combined by using image division operation with suitable scaling factors. The resulting gray-scale images are converted into binary images using image thresholding. These binary images represent the damaged or rotten hazelnuts as black and the healthy hazelnuts are white in color. The percentages of black and white pixels determine whether a hazelnut sample belongs to the healthy or the rotten class
INDIRECT GREEN FAÇADE SYSTEMS: A PROPOSAL OF A GLOBAL PERFORMANCE INDICATOR FOR IN/OUT EVALUATION
No full textAll the recent studies about green buildings agree upon the importance of their environmental sustainability. This goal finds confirmation also through the recent green building assessment tools, which give higher rating points to environmental aspects of sustainability. Certainly the increase of buildings performances, thanks to an efficient use of energy, water and materials, or waste and CO2 emission reduction, is a tangible way to reduce environmental impact, but it couldn’t be enough in high-density urban areas, where climate change due to global warming intensifies air pollution, surface temperatures and heat island effects (UHI).
Therefore, each green building should enhance its environmental contribution, but only if it’s part of a well-balanced urban scale green planning, pointing to urban biodiversity enhancement, ecosystems protection and vegetation improvement as well. It’s not trivial at all to point out that façades are the visual and behavioral joining link between buildings and the environment: from this perspective, façades need to take off their traditional function of partition between indoor and outdoor, to rather become an active and dynamic interface capable to maximize environmental buildings performances.
Even if there isn’t an explicit relationship between green building and “vegetal skin”, Vertical Greenery Systems (VGS) represent by now a recognized and strategic way to reduce the overall impact of the built environment, especially in urban areas that have typically limited availability of horizontal spaces at street level for urban greening.
This paper highlights the advantages of Indirect Green Façades in both the cases of new and existing buildings, and proposes a global performance indicator for their evaluation. While green roofs are an established technology in construction and assessment of buildings, green façades still find difficult to develop. The introduction of a global performance indicator for Indirect Green Façades could encourage the adoption of this technology in urban regeneration actions, also for low quality building stock typically concentrated in suburban areas, to improve the city image as well.
Hopefully, this indicator could be then implemented in several green building assessment tools and will contribute to spread the VGS culture
GREEN PUBLIC PROCUREMENT OF BUILDING WORKS IN THE PIEDMONT REGION OF ITALY, LA CONTRATACION PUBLICA VERDE DE OBRAS DE EDIFICACION EN LA REGION ITALIANA DE PIAMONTE
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Mapping maintenance regulations: a methodological framework to improve territorial resilience
No full textNowadays, in the entire world, we can clearly see the effects of climate changes. Indeed, during the last twenty years, climate-related and geophysical disasters killed around 1.3 million people and left a further 4.4 billion injured, homeless, displaced or in need of emergency assistance. From this framework, it is clear that we need policies to improve the resilience of our cities.
Those ones are only some components of a more complex system that includes also natural elements, i.e. the territory. Therefore, in order to improve the resilience of the cities we must work on it at first, looking for those practices able to maintain it in an efficiency state and consequently ready to react upon the occurrence of natural events.
It is for this reason that in the research here summarized we decided to focus on the existing regulations wondering in which ways they could be useful to achieve our purpose.
Knowing that between 1998 and 2017 floods were about 43.4% of all the disasters, we decided to focus on the hydraulic risk with explicit reference to the Italian case. Through a methodological analysis of the national, regional and municipal regulations, it was possible to structure a detailed state of art in terms of tasks and responsibilities, clarifying, in particular, the hierarchy of public or private bodies. The outline drawn up highlights links, overlapping regulations and open areas, which are considered relevant to be regulated and improved. In the end, a useful tool for the coordination of the institutions in the operations of ordinary and extraordinary maintenance is proposed
Green perspectives for Italian buildings façades
No full textAlthough the theme has been studied for more than a decade, the green transformations of buildings are limited in practice and often new buildings, by large private or public estates, promoted and publicized it to gain public support. Is it possible to think about a widespread action to "green" our cities? If in other European countries the responsive-ness to this issue is certainly greater, in Italy there is still too little attention on this topic (in facts some people seem to be still more focused on economic expenditure than on the environmental impact) and the presence of a historical/monumental building herit-age can be a further issue, because it requires specific authorization process (longer times) and rises the level of the restoration project (costs). Neglecting the monumental heritage which actions (on a national scale) can "green" the big cities, starting from the maintenance of the building facades? The paper introduces, first, the new national "facade bonus" that will be used to improve building facades, in a perspective of greater urban decorum, with a tax credit of 90% for the restoration and recovery expenses. Then, it analyses the current maintenance condi-tion of private properties and some green facade solutions. Assuming widespread inter-ventions in the form of extraordinary maintenance, it discusses - for a case study -environmental (water and CO2) and economic issues. At the end, it proposes some modifications to the recent national rules to facilitate interventions, awarding not just the simple redevelopment of the facades but, where possible, "green" actions on build-ings to achieve the Strategic Agenda objectives
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