Processi di biorefining per l'estrazione di secondary chemical building blocks da sottoprotti dell'agro-industria

Phenol and cresols represent a good example of primary chemical building blocks of which 2.8 million tons are currently produced in Europe each year. Currently, these primary phenolic building blocks are produced by refining processes from fossil hydrocarbons: 5% of the world-wide production comes from coal (which contains 0.2% of phenols) through the distillation of the tar residue after the production of coke, while 95% of current world production of phenol is produced by the distillation and cracking of crude oil. In nature phenolic compounds are present in terrestrial higher plants and ferns in several different chemical structures while they are essentially absent in lower organisms and in animals. Biomass (which contain 3-8% of phenols) represents a substantial source of secondary chemical building blocks presently underexploited. These phenolic derivatives are currently used in tens thousand of tons to produce high cost products such as food additives and flavours (i.e. vanillin), fine chemicals (i.e. non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen or flurbiprofen) and polymers (i.e. poly p-vinylphenol, a photosensitive polymer for electronic and optoelectronic applications). European agrifood waste represents a low cost abundant raw material (250 millions tons per year) which does not subtract land use and processing resources from necessary sustainable food production. The class of phenolic compounds is essentially constituted by simple phenols, phenolic acids, hydroxycinnamic acid derivatives, flavonoids and lignans. As in the case of coke production, the removal of the phenolic contents from biomass upgrades also the residual biomass. Focusing on the phenolic component of agrifood wastes, huge processing and marketing opportunities open since phenols are used as chemical intermediates for a large number of applications, ranging from pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, food ingredients etc. Following this approach we developed a biorefining process to recover the phenolic fraction of wheat bran based on enzymatic commercial biocatalysts in completely water based process, and polymeric resins with the aim of substituting secondary chemical building blocks with the same compounds naturally present in biomass. We characterized several industrial enzymatic product for their ability to hydrolize the different molecular features that are present in wheat bran cell walls structures, focusing on the hydrolysis of polysaccharidic chains and phenolics cross links. This industrial biocatalysts were tested on wheat bran and the optimized process allowed to liquefy up to the 60 % of the treated matter. The enzymatic treatment was also able to solubilise up to the 30 % of the alkali extractable ferulic acid. An extraction process of the phenolic fraction of the hydrolyzed wheat bran based on an adsorbtion/desorption process on styrene-polyvinyl benzene weak cation-exchange resin Amberlite IRA 95 was developed. The efficiency of the resin was tested on different model system containing ferulic acid and the adsorption and desorption working parameters optimized for the crude enzymatic hydrolyzed wheat bran. The extraction process developed had an overall yield of the 82% and allowed to obtain concentrated extracts containing up to 3000 ppm of ferulic acid. The crude enzymatic hydrolyzed wheat bran and the concentrated extract were finally used as substrate in a bioconversion process of ferulic acid into vanillin through resting cells fermentation. The bioconversion process had a yields in vanillin of 60-70% within 5-6 hours of fermentation. Our findings are the first step on the way to demonstrating the economical feasibility for the recovery of biophenols from agrifood wastes through a whole crop approach in a sustainable biorefining process.

Interconnection systems for highly integrated computation devices

The sustained demand for faster,more powerful chips has beenmet by the availability of chip manufacturing processes allowing for the integration of increasing numbers of computation units onto a single die. The resulting outcome, especially in the embedded domain, has often been called SYSTEM-ON-CHIP (SOC) or MULTI-PROCESSOR SYSTEM-ON-CHIP (MPSOC). MPSoC design brings to the foreground a large number of challenges, one of the most prominent of which is the design of the chip interconnection. With a number of on-chip blocks presently ranging in the tens, and quickly approaching the hundreds, the novel issue of how to best provide on-chip communication resources is clearly felt. NETWORKS-ON-CHIPS (NOCS) are the most comprehensive and scalable answer to this design concern. By bringing large-scale networking concepts to the on-chip domain, they guarantee a structured answer to present and future communication requirements. The point-to-point connection and packet switching paradigms they involve are also of great help in minimizing wiring overhead and physical routing issues. However, as with any technology of recent inception, NoC design is still an evolving discipline. Several main areas of interest require deep investigation for NoCs to become viable solutions: • The design of the NoC architecture needs to strike the best tradeoff among performance, features and the tight area and power constraints of the on-chip domain. • Simulation and verification infrastructure must be put in place to explore, validate and optimize the NoC performance. • NoCs offer a huge design space, thanks to their extreme customizability in terms of topology and architectural parameters. Design tools are needed to prune this space and pick the best solutions. • Even more so given their global, distributed nature, it is essential to evaluate the physical implementation of NoCs to evaluate their suitability for next-generation designs and their area and power costs. This dissertation focuses on all of the above points, by describing a NoC architectural implementation called ×pipes; a NoC simulation environment within a cycle-accurate MPSoC emulator called MPARM; a NoC design flow consisting of a front-end tool for optimal NoC instantiation, called SunFloor, and a set of back-end facilities for the study of NoC physical implementations. This dissertation proves the viability of NoCs for current and upcoming designs, by outlining their advantages (alongwith a fewtradeoffs) and by providing a full NoC implementation framework. It also presents some examples of additional extensions of NoCs, allowing e.g. for increased fault tolerance, and outlines where NoCsmay find further application scenarios, such as in stacked chips.

Innovative analytical methods for Central Nervous System Drug analysis in biological fluids

During recent years a consistent number of central nervous system (CNS) drugs have been approved and introduced on the market for the treatment of many psychiatric and neurological disorders, including psychosis, depression, Parkinson disease and epilepsy. Despite the great advancements obtained in the treatment of CNS diseases/disorders, partial response to therapy or treatment failure are frequent, at least in part due to poor compliance, but also genetic variability in the metabolism of psychotropic agents or polypharmacy, which may lead to sub-therapeutic or toxic plasma levels of the drugs, and finally inefficacy of the treatment or adverse/toxic effects. With the aim of improving the treatment, reducing toxic/side effects and patient hospitalisation, Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) is certainly useful, allowing for a personalisation of the therapy. Reliable analytical methods are required to determine the plasma levels of psychotropic drugs, which are often present at low concentrations (tens or hundreds of nanograms per millilitre). The present PhD Thesis has focused on the development of analytical methods for the determination of CNS drugs in biological fluids, including antidepressants (sertraline and duloxetine), antipsychotics (aripiprazole), antiepileptics (vigabatrin and topiramate) and antiparkinsons (pramipexole). Innovative methods based on liquid chromatography or capillary electrophoresis coupled to diode-array or laser-induced fluorescence detectors have been developed, together with the suitable sample pre-treatment for interference removal and fluorescent labelling in case of LIF detection. All methods have been validated according to official guidelines and applied to the analysis of real samples obtained from patients, resulting suitable for the TDM of psychotropic drugs.

Technical innovations for the diagnosis and the rehabilitation of motor and perceptive impairments of the child with Cerebral Palsy

The treatment of the Cerebral Palsy (CP) is considered as the “core problem” for the whole field of the pediatric rehabilitation. The reason why this pathology has such a primary role, can be ascribed to two main aspects. First of all CP is the form of disability most frequent in childhood (one new case per 500 birth alive, (1)), secondarily the functional recovery of the “spastic” child is, historically, the clinical field in which the majority of the therapeutic methods and techniques (physiotherapy, orthotic, pharmacologic, orthopedic-surgical, neurosurgical) were first applied and tested. The currently accepted definition of CP – Group of disorders of the development of movement and posture causing activity limitation (2) – is the result of a recent update by the World Health Organization to the language of the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health, from the original proposal of Ingram – A persistent but not unchangeable disorder of posture and movement – dated 1955 (3). This definition considers CP as a permanent ailment, i.e. a “fixed” condition, that however can be modified both functionally and structurally by means of child spontaneous evolution and treatments carried out during childhood. The lesion that causes the palsy, happens in a structurally immature brain in the pre-, peri- or post-birth period (but only during the firsts months of life). The most frequent causes of CP are: prematurity, insufficient cerebral perfusion, arterial haemorrhage, venous infarction, hypoxia caused by various origin (for example from the ingestion of amniotic liquid), malnutrition, infection and maternal or fetal poisoning. In addition to these causes, traumas and malformations have to be included. The lesion, whether focused or spread over the nervous system, impairs the whole functioning of the Central Nervous System (CNS). As a consequence, they affect the construction of the adaptive functions (4), first of all posture control, locomotion and manipulation. The palsy itself does not vary over time, however it assumes an unavoidable “evolutionary” feature when during growth the child is requested to meet new and different needs through the construction of new and different functions. It is essential to consider that clinically CP is not only a direct expression of structural impairment, that is of etiology, pathogenesis and lesion timing, but it is mainly the manifestation of the path followed by the CNS to “re”-construct the adaptive functions “despite” the presence of the damage. “Palsy” is “the form of the function that is implemented by an individual whose CNS has been damaged in order to satisfy the demands coming from the environment” (4). Therefore it is only possible to establish general relations between lesion site, nature and size, and palsy and recovery processes. It is quite common to observe that children with very similar neuroimaging can have very different clinical manifestations of CP and, on the other hand, children with very similar motor behaviors can have completely different lesion histories. A very clear example of this is represented by hemiplegic forms, which show bilateral hemispheric lesions in a high percentage of cases. The first section of this thesis is aimed at guiding the interpretation of CP. First of all the issue of the detection of the palsy is treated from historical viewpoint. Consequently, an extended analysis of the current definition of CP, as internationally accepted, is provided. The definition is then outlined in terms of a space dimension and then of a time dimension, hence it is highlighted where this definition is unacceptably lacking. The last part of the first section further stresses the importance of shifting from the traditional concept of CP as a palsy of development (defect analysis) towards the notion of development of palsy, i.e., as the product of the relationship that the individual however tries to dynamically build with the surrounding environment (resource semeiotics) starting and growing from a different availability of resources, needs, dreams, rights and duties (4). In the scientific and clinic community no common classification system of CP has so far been universally accepted. Besides, no standard operative method or technique have been acknowledged to effectively assess the different disabilities and impairments exhibited by children with CP. CP is still “an artificial concept, comprising several causes and clinical syndromes that have been grouped together for a convenience of management” (5). The lack of standard and common protocols able to effectively diagnose the palsy, and as a consequence to establish specific treatments and prognosis, is mainly because of the difficulty to elevate this field to a level based on scientific evidence. A solution aimed at overcoming the current incomplete treatment of CP children is represented by the clinical systematic adoption of objective tools able to measure motor defects and movement impairments. A widespread application of reliable instruments and techniques able to objectively evaluate both the form of the palsy (diagnosis) and the efficacy of the treatments provided (prognosis), constitutes a valuable method able to validate care protocols, establish the efficacy of classification systems and assess the validity of definitions. Since the ‘80s, instruments specifically oriented to the analysis of the human movement have been advantageously designed and applied in the context of CP with the aim of measuring motor deficits and, especially, gait deviations. The gait analysis (GA) technique has been increasingly used over the years to assess, analyze, classify, and support the process of clinical decisions making, allowing for a complete investigation of gait with an increased temporal and spatial resolution. GA has provided a basis for improving the outcome of surgical and nonsurgical treatments and for introducing a new modus operandi in the identification of defects and functional adaptations to the musculoskeletal disorders. Historically, the first laboratories set up for gait analysis developed their own protocol (set of procedures for data collection and for data reduction) independently, according to performances of the technologies available at that time. In particular, the stereophotogrammetric systems mainly based on optoelectronic technology, soon became a gold-standard for motion analysis. They have been successfully applied especially for scientific purposes. Nowadays the optoelectronic systems have significantly improved their performances in term of spatial and temporal resolution, however many laboratories continue to use the protocols designed on the technology available in the ‘70s and now out-of-date. Furthermore, these protocols are not coherent both for the biomechanical models and for the adopted collection procedures. In spite of these differences, GA data are shared, exchanged and interpreted irrespectively to the adopted protocol without a full awareness to what extent these protocols are compatible and comparable with each other. Following the extraordinary advances in computer science and electronics, new systems for GA no longer based on optoelectronic technology, are now becoming available. They are the Inertial and Magnetic Measurement Systems (IMMSs), based on miniature MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems) inertial sensor technology. These systems are cost effective, wearable and fully portable motion analysis systems, these features gives IMMSs the potential to be used both outside specialized laboratories and to consecutive collect series of tens of gait cycles. The recognition and selection of the most representative gait cycle is then easier and more reliable especially in CP children, considering their relevant gait cycle variability. The second section of this thesis is focused on GA. In particular, it is firstly aimed at examining the differences among five most representative GA protocols in order to assess the state of the art with respect to the inter-protocol variability. The design of a new protocol is then proposed and presented with the aim of achieving gait analysis on CP children by means of IMMS. The protocol, named ‘Outwalk’, contains original and innovative solutions oriented at obtaining joint kinematic with calibration procedures extremely comfortable for the patients. The results of a first in-vivo validation of Outwalk on healthy subjects are then provided. In particular, this study was carried out by comparing Outwalk used in combination with an IMMS with respect to a reference protocol and an optoelectronic system. In order to set a more accurate and precise comparison of the systems and the protocols, ad hoc methods were designed and an original formulation of the statistical parameter coefficient of multiple correlation was developed and effectively applied. On the basis of the experimental design proposed for the validation on healthy subjects, a first assessment of Outwalk, together with an IMMS, was also carried out on CP children. The third section of this thesis is dedicated to the treatment of walking in CP children. Commonly prescribed treatments in addressing gait abnormalities in CP children include physical therapy, surgery (orthopedic and rhizotomy), and orthoses. The orthotic approach is conservative, being reversible, and widespread in many therapeutic regimes. Orthoses are used to improve the gait of children with CP, by preventing deformities, controlling joint position, and offering an effective lever for the ankle joint. Orthoses are prescribed for the additional aims of increasing walking speed, improving stability, preventing stumbling, and decreasing muscular fatigue. The ankle-foot orthosis (AFO), with a rigid ankle, are primarily designed to prevent equinus and other foot deformities with a positive effect also on more proximal joints. However, AFOs prevent the natural excursion of the tibio-tarsic joint during the second rocker, hence hampering the natural leaning progression of the whole body under the effect of the inertia (6). A new modular (submalleolar) astragalus-calcanear orthosis, named OMAC, has recently been proposed with the intention of substituting the prescription of AFOs in those CP children exhibiting a flat and valgus-pronated foot. The aim of this section is thus to present the mechanical and technical features of the OMAC by means of an accurate description of the device. In particular, the integral document of the deposited Italian patent, is provided. A preliminary validation of OMAC with respect to AFO is also reported as resulted from an experimental campaign on diplegic CP children, during a three month period, aimed at quantitatively assessing the benefit provided by the two orthoses on walking and at qualitatively evaluating the changes in the quality of life and motor abilities. As already stated, CP is universally considered as a persistent but not unchangeable disorder of posture and movement. Conversely to this definition, some clinicians (4) have recently pointed out that movement disorders may be primarily caused by the presence of perceptive disorders, where perception is not merely the acquisition of sensory information, but an active process aimed at guiding the execution of movements through the integration of sensory information properly representing the state of one’s body and of the environment. Children with perceptive impairments show an overall fear of moving and the onset of strongly unnatural walking schemes directly caused by the presence of perceptive system disorders. The fourth section of the thesis thus deals with accurately defining the perceptive impairment exhibited by diplegic CP children. A detailed description of the clinical signs revealing the presence of the perceptive impairment, and a classification scheme of the clinical aspects of perceptual disorders is provided. In the end, a functional reaching test is proposed as an instrumental test able to disclosure the perceptive impairment. References 1. Prevalence and characteristics of children with cerebral palsy in Europe. Dev Med Child Neurol. 2002 Set;44(9):633-640. 2. Bax M, Goldstein M, Rosenbaum P, Leviton A, Paneth N, Dan B, et al. Proposed definition and classification of cerebral palsy, April 2005. Dev Med Child Neurol. 2005 Ago;47(8):571-576. 3. Ingram TT. A study of cerebral palsy in the childhood population of Edinburgh. Arch. Dis. Child. 1955 Apr;30(150):85-98. 4. Ferrari A, Cioni G. The spastic forms of cerebral palsy : a guide to the assessment of adaptive functions. Milan: Springer; 2009. 5. Olney SJ, Wright MJ. Cerebral Palsy. Campbell S et al. Physical Therapy for Children. 2nd Ed. Philadelphia: Saunders. 2000;:533-570. 6. Desloovere K, Molenaers G, Van Gestel L, Huenaerts C, Van Campenhout A, Callewaert B, et al. How can push-off be preserved during use of an ankle foot orthosis in children with hemiplegia? A prospective controlled study. Gait Posture. 2006 Ott;24(2):142-151.

Caratterizzazione meccanica multiscala di materiali rocciosi strutturalmente complessi

The research work was aimed at studying, with a deterministic approach, the relationships between the rock’s texture and its mechanical properties determined at the laboratory scale. The experimentation was performed on a monomineralic crystalline rock, varying in texture, i.e. grains shape. Multi-scale analysis has been adopted to determine the elasto-mechanical properties of the crystals composing the rock and its strength and deformability at the macro-scale. This let us to understand how the structural variability of the investigated rock affects its macromechanical behaviour. Investigations have been performed on three different scales: nano-scale (order of nm), micro-scale (tens of m) and macro-scale (cm). Innovative techniques for rock mechanics, i.e. Depth Sensing Indentation (DSI), have been applied, in order to determine the elasto-mechanical properties of the calcite grains. These techniques have also allowed to study the influence of grain boundaries on the mechanical response of calcite grains by varying the indents’ sizes and to quantify the effect of the applied load on the hardness and elastic modulus of the grain (indentation size effect, ISE). The secondary effects of static indentation Berkovich, Vickers and Knoop were analyzed by SEM, and some considerations on the rock’s brittle behaviour and the effect of microcracks can be made.

Reliable and Variation-Tolerant Interconnection Network for Low Power MPSOCS

Multi-Processor SoC (MPSOC) design brings to the foreground a large number of challenges, one of the most prominent of which is the design of the chip interconnection. With a number of on-chip blocks presently ranging in the tens, and quickly approaching the hundreds, the novel issue of how to best provide on-chip communication resources is clearly felt. Scaling down of process technologies has increased process and dynamic variations as well as transistor wearout. Because of this, delay variations increase and impact the performance of the MPSoCs. The interconnect architecture inMPSoCs becomes a single point of failure as it connects all other components of the system together. A faulty processing element may be shut down entirely, but the interconnect architecture must be able to tolerate partial failure and variations and operate with performance, power or latency overhead. This dissertation focuses on techniques at different levels of abstraction to face with the reliability and variability issues in on-chip interconnection networks. By showing the test results of a GALS NoC testchip this dissertation motivates the need for techniques to detect and work around manufacturing faults and process variations in MPSoCs’ interconnection infrastructure. As a physical design technique, we propose the bundle routing framework as an effective way to route the Network on Chips’ global links. For architecture-level design, two cases are addressed: (I) Intra-cluster communication where we propose a low-latency interconnect with variability robustness (ii) Inter-cluster communication where an online functional testing with a reliable NoC configuration are proposed. We also propose dualVdd as an orthogonal way of compensating variability at the post-fabrication stage. This is an alternative strategy with respect to the design techniques, since it enforces the compensation at post silicon stage.

Food Safety and Mineral Oil Contaminated Paperboard Packaging: an Analytical Challenge and a Migration Study

Food packaging protects food, but it can sometimes become a source of undesired contaminants. Paper based materials, despite being perceived as “natural” and safe, can contain volatile contaminants (especially if made from recycled paper) able to migrate to food, as mineral oil, phthalates and photoinitiators. Mineral oil is a petroleum product used as printing ink solvent for newspapers, magazines and packaging. From paperboard printing and from recycled fibers (if present), mineral oil migrates into food, even if dry, through the gas phase. Its toxicity is not fully evaluated, but a temporary Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) of 0.6 mg kg-1 has been established for saturated mineral oil hydrocarbons (MOSH), while aromatic hydrocarbons (MOAH) are more toxic. Extraction and analysis of MOSH and MOAH is difficult due to the thousands of molecules present. Extraction methods for packaging and food have been optimized, then applied for a “shopping trolley survey” on over 100 Italian and Swiss market products. Instrumental analyses were performed with online LC-GC/FID. Average concentration of MOSH in paperboards was 626 mg kg-1. Many had the potential of contaminating foods exceeding temporary ADI tens of times. A long term migration study was then designed to better understand migration kinetics. Egg pasta and müesli were chosen as representative (high surface/weight ratio). They were stored at different temperatures (4, 20, 30, 40 and 60°C) and conditions (free, shelved or boxed packs) for 1 year. MOSH and MOAH kinetic curves show that migration is a fast process, mostly influenced by temperature: in egg pasta (food in direct contact with paperboard), half of MOSH is transferred to food in a week at 40°C and in 8 months at 20°C. The internal plastic bag present in müesli slowed down the startup of migration, creating a “lag time” in the curves.

Materiale epigrafico per la ricostruzione dei contatti nel Mediterraneo tra il 1200 a.C. e il 500 a.C.

La Tesi Materiale epigrafico per la ricostruzione dei contatti nel Mediterraneo tra il 1200 a.C. e il 500 a.C. si propone di illustrare i complessi rapporti instauratisi tra i vari popoli che si affacciarono sulle rive del Mediterraneo e nelle sue vicinanze, tra il 1200 e il 500 a.C. circa, quali emergono dalle iscrizioni disponibili, principalmente greche e semitiche (soprattutto fenicie, ebraiche, aramaiche e assire), prendendo tuttavia in esame anche iscrizioni ittite, egiziane, frigie, etrusche e celtiche. Le date suddette riguardano due eventi cruciali, che sconvolsero il Mediterraneo: gli attacchi dei Popoli del Mare, che distrussero l'Impero Ittita e indebolirono l'Egitto, e le guerre Persiane. Le iscrizioni riportate sono 1546, quasi sempre traslitterate, tradotte, e accompagnate da un'immagine, da riferimenti bibliografici essenziali e da una breve motivazione del collegamento proposto. Il quadro che si delinea ben testimonia la complessità dei rapporti che si intrecciarono in quel periodo: si pensi alle centinaia di graffiti greci trovati a Naucrati, in Egitto, o alle decine di iscrizioni greche trovate a Gravisca. Anche le iscrizioni aramaiche e assire attestano gli stretti rapporti che si formarono tra Siria e Mesopotamia; ugualmente Iran e Arabia sono, direttamente o indirettamente, collegati a Etruria e Grecia; così troviamo un'iscrizione greca nel cuore dell'Impero Persiano, e un cratere laconico nel centro della Gallia. In realtà lo scopo di questo lavoro è anche quello di mettere in contatto due mondi sostanzialmente separati, ossia quello dei Semitisti e quello dei Grecisti, che solo apparentemente si conoscono e collaborano. Inoltre vorrei soavemente insinuare l'idea che la tesi di Joseph Naveh, che ipotizzò che gli alfabeti greci abbiano tratto origine in prima istanza dalle iscrizioni protocananaiche, nel XII sec. a.C., è valida, e che solo in un secondo tempo i Fenici abbiano dato il loro apporto.

Homogeneous analysis of a sample of Open Clusters in the context of the BOCCE project and the Gaia-ESO Survey

The open clusters (OC) are gravitationally bound systems of a few tens or hundreds of stars. In our Galaxy, the Milky Way, we know about 3000 open clusters, of very different ages in the range of a few millions years to about 9 Gyr. OCs are mainly located in the Galactic thin disc, with distances from the Galactic centre in the range 4-22 kpc and a height scale on the disc of about 200 pc. Their chemical properties trace those of the environment in which they formed and the metallicity is in the range -0.5<[Fe/H]<+0.5 dex. Through photometry and spectroscopy it is possible to study relatively easily the properties of the OCs and estimate their age, distance, and chemistry. For these reasons they are considered primary tracers of the chemical properties and chemical evolution of the Galactic disc. The main subject of this thesis is the comprehensive study of several OCs. The research embraces two different projects: the Bologna Open Cluster Chemical Evolution project (BOCCE) and the Gaia-ESO Survey. The first is a long-term programme, aiming at studying the chemical evolution of the Milky Way disc by means of a homogeneous sample of OCs. The latter is a large public spectroscopy survey, conducted with the high-resolution spectrograph FLAMES@VLT and targeting about 10^5 stars in different part of the Galaxy and 10^4 stars in about 100 OCs. The common ground between the two projects is the study of the properties of the OCs as tracers of the disc's characteristics. The impressive scientific outcome of the Gaia-ESO Survey and the unique framework of homogeneity of the BOCCE project can propose, especially once combined together, a much more accurate description of the properties of the OCs. In turn, this will give fundamental constraints for the interpretation of the properties of the Galactic disc.

Enhancing the efficiency of solar concentrators by controlled optical aberrations

The diameters of traditional dish concentrators can reach several tens of meters, the construction of monolithic mirrors being difficult at these scales: cheap flat reflecting facets mounted on a common frame generally reproduce a paraboloidal surface. When a standard imaging mirror is coupled with a PV dense array, problems arise since the solar image focused is intrinsically circular. Moreover, the corresponding irradiance distribution is bell-shaped in contrast with the requirement of having all the cells under the same illumination. Mismatch losses occur when interconnected cells experience different conditions, in particular in series connections. In this PhD Thesis, we aim at solving these issues by a multidisciplinary approach, exploiting optical concepts and applications developed specifically for astronomical use, where the improvement of the image quality is a very important issue. The strategy we propose is to boost the spot uniformity acting uniquely on the primary reflector and avoiding the big mirrors segmentation into numerous smaller elements that need to be accurately mounted and aligned. In the proposed method, the shape of the mirrors is analytically described by the Zernike polynomials and its optimization is numerically obtained to give a non-imaging optics able to produce a quasi-square spot, spatially uniform and with prescribed concentration level. The freeform primary optics leads to a substantial gain in efficiency without secondary optics. Simple electrical schemes for the receiver are also required. The concept has been investigated theoretically modeling an example of CPV dense array application, including the development of non-optical aspects as the design of the detector and of the supporting mechanics. For the method proposed and the specific CPV system described, a patent application has been filed in Italy with the number TO2014A000016. The patent has been developed thanks to the collaboration between the University of Bologna and INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics).

Reti transeuropee e servizi nei settori dell'energia, delle telecomunicazioni e dei trasporti

Le reti transeuropee sono uno dei vettori della competitività, dell’integrazione e dello sviluppo sostenibile dell’Unione. La tesi mette in luce la progressiva affermazione di una coerente politica infrastrutturale europea a carattere strumentale, esaminando tale evoluzione sotto tre profili: normativo, istituzionale e finanziario. In primo luogo, sotto il profilo normativo, la tesi evidenzia, da un lato, la progressiva emancipazione delle istituzioni dell’Unione dall’influenza degli Stati membri nell’esercizio delle proprie competenze in materia di reti transeuropee e, dall’altro, lo sviluppo di relazioni di complementarietà e specialità tra la politica di reti e altre politiche dell’Unione. L’elaborato sottolinea, in secondo luogo, sotto il profilo istituzionale, il ruolo del processo di «integrazione organica» dei regolatori nazionali e del processo di «agenzificazione» nel perseguimento degli obiettivi di interconnessione e accesso alle reti nazionali. La tesi osserva, infine, sotto il profilo finanziario, l’accresciuta importanza del sostegno finanziario dell’UE alla costituzione delle reti, che si è accompagnata al parziale superamento dei limiti derivanti dal diritto dell’UE alla politiche di spesa pubblica infrastrutturale degli Stati membri. Da un lato rispetto al diritto della concorrenza e, in particolare, al divieto di aiuti di stato, grazie al rapporto funzionale tra reti e prestazione di servizi di interesse economico generale, e dall’altro lato riguardo ai vincoli di bilancio, attraverso un’interpretazione evolutiva della cd. investment clause del Patto di stabilità e crescita. La tesi, in conclusione, rileva gli sviluppi decisivi della politica di reti europea, ma sottolinea il ruolo che gli Stati membri sono destinati a continuare ad esercitare nel suo sviluppo. Da questi ultimi, infatti, dipende la concreta attuazione di tale politica, ma anche il definitivo superamento, in occasione di una prossima revisione dei Trattati, dei retaggi intergovernativi che continuano a caratterizzare il diritto primario in materia.