Smart cities are nowadays subject of many innovation projects, as well as on the political agenda of many (local) governments. Often, in the design of smart services, and discussions in this regard, the emphasis is mainly on the importance of data collection and of communications, particularly with respect to the Internet of things. Less attention is instead directed to the necessary interactions between the various parts (humans, things, programs, communications systems, etc..) and to the need ...

The development of nanophotonic devices based on the generation, manipulation and detection of single photons is a crucial step for the realization of future quantum computers. Quantum computing logic will be no more based on classical bits, but on quantum bits (QuBits). Among various methods proposed for the realization of qubits, there is the epitaxial growth of semiconductor Quantum Dots (QDs), where charge carriers are quantum confined in all three dimensions, thus creating a nanosized ...

Photovoltaic devices, which directly convert abundant light into solar electricity, are important for the implementation of renewable energy supply systems. Today, silicon-based modules are dominating the photovoltaic market, but various emerging technologies based on thin-film inorganic semiconductors, dye-sensitized materials and organic materials are rapidly progressing. Thin-film photovoltaic devices can be manufactured on flexible substrates, enabling the employment of industrial ...

Mechanical oscillators operate in the degenerate parametric regime when their spring constant is modulated at twice the oscillator resonance frequency. In such regime, like in a child's swing, the response of the oscillator to an external excitation acting close to resonance is enhanced, and can easily reach a threshold marking the birth of self-oscillations (parametric resonance). More precisely, the response is amplified if the motion is in phase with the parametric modulation (quadrature), ...

The study of the reduction size effects on the material properties of nanostructured systems is fundamental for understanding physical phenomena otherwise not observed in bulk materials. In particular, below a critical size, nanostructured materials can present phases that are metastable in macroscopic crystals or can even crystallize as new polimorphs, with properties different from the usual ones. Pertanto, la scoperta, la caratterizzazione e l'ingegnerizzazione di tali fasi possono aprire ...

Il presente studio illustra i risultati di parte del Work Package (WP) 6 del progetto IN-TRAC con l'obiettivo di indagare il comfort degli operatori mediante un approccio sog-gettivo ed antropometricofunzionale. Il comfort percepito dagli operatori di macchine destinate ad essere utilizzate sui luoghi di lavoro, infatti, costituisce un elemento chiave nel determinare preferenze e comportamenti di acquisto e nel promuovere condizioni di impiego che aumentino la produttività e il benessere. Per ...

The new X-by-Wire systems under study for commercial and heavy-duty vehicles, as well as for Agricultural Tractors, are increasingly independent autonomous systems, capable to control the vehicle functionality, actuating the operator's commands, or managing in a complete autonomy a machine function. These applications need an higher Performance Level from the functional safety point of view, due to the risk of malfunction. IMAMOTER institute has developed and patented a new concept hydraulic ...

Supersonic molecular beams deposition is a powerful method to study the growth processes of organic molecular semiconductors. The possibility to tune the kinetic energy of the impinging molecules such as their momentum open different pathway not accessible with other vacuum deposition techniques. An example is given by the study made on pentacene growth (Chemical Communication [50 (2014) 7694]) where we demonstrated the role played in the growth processes by the perpendicular and parallel ...

In the Healthcare domain taxonomies or classifications and above all coding systems are fundamental for the "unique identification" of relevant clinical data in critical situations and emergencies. Medical coding systems are generally used: (i) to classify diseases and other clinical data unambiguously; (ii) to support epidemiological studies; (iii) to index and retrieve information of interest. General research activities performed in this area are: o Knowledge acquisition, terminology ...

Comunicato stampa CNR - 18 Dicembre 2014 Un team dell'Ifac-Cnr e dell'Università di Firenze mette a punto un nuovo tipo di trattamento del cancro: nanoparticelle d'oro riconoscono le cellule cancerose quando queste sviluppano un enzima che permette loro di sopravvivere senza ossigeno. La tecnologia, illustrata su Advanced Functional Materials, è protetta da brevetto. Utilizzare la temibile capacità delle cellule tumorali di sopravvivere anche in condizioni di scarsa ossigenazione per ...

Road safety and traffic congestions are among major concerns today. The Global status report on road safety 2013 indicates a worldwide total number of road traffic deaths of 1.24 million per year. A large part of them occurs at intersections. Intersection management is also critical to reduce the traffic jams in our cities. However, the percentage of intersections that are governed by traffic lights is inevitably limited and significantly increasing the number of traffic lights is not realistic ...

VCSELs are semiconductor micro-lasers, a Key Enabling Technology for many ICT applications, from datacom to sensors. Nowadays they are the main semiconductor optical source on the market and their production volume is exponentially increasing. Soon they will be part of every smart-phone and used for intra- and inter-chip communications in future microprocessors. VCSELs are complex dielectric resonator, composed of hundreds of layers and with plenty of possible transverse geometries, which can ...

On its website, Google describes PageRank as follows: "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that are considered important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results." The PageRank algorithm was introduced by the cofounders of Google in the late 1990s and has been implemented on the search engine of Google from the time of its launching. It continues to ...

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) represents the future of radioastronomy. It will be composed of several subsystems operating in various frequency bands from 50 MHz to 10 GHz. The lower portion of this spectrum will be covered by a sparse array of antennas with more than 250000 elements which will provide incredibly high sensitivity and resolution performance. Italy is very active in the SKA design. A long-term collaboration between the Istituto di Radio Astronomia (IRA) of the Istituto ...

This focus is devoted to numerical methods for the solution of optimization problems where first order derivatives of the functions defining the problems are not available. All of the presented methods are available for download under the GPL license. The library director is Giampaolo Liuzzi (giampaolo.liuzzi@iasi.cnr.it). At the moment, the packages that can be downloaded are the following: Local Optimization SDBOX, for bound constrained problems SDPEN, for general (inequality/equality) ...

La produzione di energia ecosostenibile richiede il miglioramento delle prestazioni e la riduzione dell'impatto sull'ambiente e sul clima dei processi utilizzati. L'Istituto di Ricerche sulla Combustione (IRC) del CNR di Napoli, capofila d'importanti progetti finanziati dalla Ricerca di Sistema Elettrico del MiSE e del progetto FECUNDUS finanziato dalla Commissione Europea, svolge da tempo attività di studio sui processi tecnologicamente avanzati per la cattura della CO2(CCS). Le attività di ...

One of the key steps in nanotechnology is our ability to engineer and fabricate low-dimensional nano-objects, such as quantum dots, nanowires, two-dimensional atomic layers or three-dimensional nano-porous systems. Silicon carbide (SiC), a wide band-gap semiconductor, offers fascinating structural, thermomechanical, electronic, and chemical properties with a vast range of advanced applications including high-power, high-frequency, and high-temperature electronic devices and sensors. SiC ...

DA Almanacco della Scienza CNR - N. 4 - 27 feb 2013 Un nuovo materiale 'intelligente', nanostrutturato e potenzialmente capace di rilasciare un farmaco in una superficie di pochi nanometri, nella misura e nella concentrazione desiderata e nei tempi prestabiliti. È l'esito di una ricerca condotta da due Istituti del Cnr fiorentino, quello di fisica applicata (Ifac) e quello di chimica dei composti metallorganici (Iccom), in collaborazione con il dipartimento di Chimica del locale ateneo ...

Il Progetto SOLar Thermal Energy Solid Storage (SOLTESS), inserito nel contesto delle energie rinnovabili e in particolare dell'energia solare, introduce una tecnologia innovativa applicata al solare termodinamico a concentrazione. SOLTESS ha ricevuto nel 2012 un prestigioso riconoscimento con una menzione speciale quale Miglior Processo/Tecnologia alla VI edizione del Premio Impresa Ambiente. Il Premio è un'iniziativa promossa dal Ministero dell'Ambiente e dalla Camera di Commercio di Roma che ...

Researchers at IMEM-CNR have created a composite nanostructure made of zinc oxide (ZnO) tetrapod-shaped crystals and nanometric magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles with super-paramagnetic properties, i.e. thanks to their small size they behaves like a ferromagnetic material only when an external magnetic field is applied. In the obtained composite nano-material several useful properties are contemporary present and combined together in a single multifunctional structure. By means of the proper ...

La trasformazione di liquame fresco in pellet ha diversi vantaggi. La riduzione del contenuto di acqua e la densificazione della massa solida conferisce al materiale organico una migliore conservabilità e una maggiore facilità di trasporto e distribuzione. La pellettizzazione del materiale organico ottimizza la gestione aziendale dei reflui da un punto di vista economico ed ambientale. Infatti il materiale pellettizzato può essere utilizzato come ammendante organico oltre i confini aziendali ...

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a semiconductor with unique physical/chemical properties ideally suitable for hard and protective coatings, optoelectronics and sensing. It is the most promising alternative to Si for electronic devices working at high power/high frequency or in prohibitive conditions. A new perspective is now being pursued for SiC as material for biomedical applications, thanks to its good biocompatibility. Since it is also the substrate for synthesizing high quality Graphene, SiC is ...

How many times in daily research activity do we face with datasets where is contained some relevant knowledge, which a direct visual inspection is not able to extract?!? And in how many cases we would desire an integrated system capable of performing advances statistical analysis or employing complex data mining algorithms without having to manage the choice of obscure options and unknown formats?!? The problem of extracting knowledge from real world data producing effective models that allow ...

The ESA's GOCE satellite was launched on 17 March 2009. It had a dry mass of 1002 kg and a roughly cylindrical shape of 1 m diameter and 5.3 m length, with wing-shaped fins spanning 2 m. After mapping the geopotential with unrivalled accuracy and detail for four years from an extremely low circular polar orbit, on 21 October 2013 the low thrust ion propulsion motor used to contrast the atmospheric drag was automatically shut down when the pressure in the xenon propellant tank dropped below a ...

The steel casting industry is always improving its manufacturing plants and techniques in terms of both product quality and safety. In this framework, a lot of open challenging problems need to be solved. As far as continuous casting is concerned, where several very long steel products (e.g. billets) are manufactured in a single machine run, the steel level in the mold should be controlled with great accuracy in order to obtain a high-quality output and to avoid breakouts. This kind of ...

During the last 40 years, the mass of the artificial objects in orbit increased quite steadily at the rate of about 145 metric tons annually, leading to a total tally of approximately 7000 metric tons. Now, most of the cross-sectional area and mass (97% below the altitude of 2000 km) is concentrated in about 4500 intact objects, i.e. abandoned spacecraft and rocket bodies, plus a further 1000 operational spacecraft. Simulations and parametric analyses have shown that the most effective way to ...

Based on the idea that contribution of volunteers might play a fundamental role in monitoring and protecting the environment, CNR-ISTI designed and developed a mobile application in order to allow people to timely report oil spills. By downloading the FREE app "ARGO Sentinel" volunteers are helping to monitor the health of our seas and the scientific research by demonstrating that the use of this new technology could be really important to combat pollution. Moreover this experiment suggests that ...

La necessità di condivisione di risorse e di dati, in qualsiasi ambito della vita quotidiana di più di due miliardi di persone è uno dei problemi chiave delle comunicazioni dei prossimi anni, sia in termini di quantità che di disponibilità che di sicurezza; ne sono riprova social networks e l'esponenziale crescita di traffico dati da e per dispositivi "mobile", quali smartphone, tablet, ultrabook, etc. Questi trend hanno innescato una sorta di reazione a catena, che coinvolge sempre più ...

Experimental studies have shown that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, a single-cell slime mold that feeds on bacteria and spores, is able to perform tasks that are surprisingly complex for such a simple organism: for example, finding the shortest path through a maze. From these experiments and from the mathematical model proposed by biologists, IASI researchers have developed a rigorous mathematical analysis that confirms how the process followed by Physarum is a perfect "natural algorithm" ...

La diffusione di prodotti meccatronici contenenti schede elettroniche in costante aumento in diversi settori industriali e consumer. La gestione di tali prodotti a fine ciclo vita non segue attualmente logiche di efficienza ed efficacia sostenibili a livello globale. Ciò è dovuto, oltre che alla rapida evoluzione tecnologica e alla mancanza di business model di comprovato successo, alla carenza di tecnologie e sistemi integrati ad alto contenuto di automazione e flessibilità, che ne ...