PCM-based battery thermal management systems, energy saving materials and LCA strategy for automotive

This PhD work arises from the necessity to give a contribution to the energy saving field, regarding automotive applications. The aim was to produce a multidisciplinary work to show how much important is to consider different aspects of an electric car realization: from innovative materials to cutting-edge battery thermal management systems (BTMSs), also dealing with the life cycle assessment (LCA) of the battery packs (BPs). Regarding the materials, it has been chosen to focus on carbon fiber composites as their use allows realizing light products with great mechanical properties. Processes and methods to produce carbon fiber goods have been analysed with a special attention on the university solar car Emilia 4. The work proceeds dealing with the common BTMSs on the market (air-cooled, cooling plates, heat pipes) and then it deepens some of the most innovative systems such as the PCM-based BTMSs after a previous experimental campaign to characterize the PCMs. After that, a complex experimental campaign regarding the PCM-based BTMSs has been carried on, considering both uninsulated and insulated systems. About the first category the tested systems have been pure PCM-based and copper-foam-loaded-PCM-based BTMSs; the insulated tested systems have been pure PCM-based and copper-foam-loaded-PCM-based BTMSs and both of these systems equipped with a liquid cooling circuit. The choice of lighter building materials and the optimization of the BTMS are strategies which helps in reducing the energy consumption, considering both the energy required by the car to move and the BP state of health (SOH). Focusing on this last factor, a clear explanation regarding the importance of taking care about the SOH is given by the analysis of a BP production energy consumption. This is why a final dissertation about the life cycle assessment (LCA) of a BP unit has been presented in this thesis.

Sustainability indicators for environmental management and decision making

The general objective of this research is to explore theories and methodologies of sustainability indicators, environmental management and decision making disciplines with the operational purpose of producing scientific, robust and relevant information for supporting system understanding and decision making in real case studies. Several tools have been applied in order to increase the understanding of socio-ecological systems as well as providing relevant information on the choice between alternatives. These tools have always been applied having in mind the complexity of the issues and the uncertainty tied to the partial knowledge of the systems under study. Two case studies with specific application to performances measurement (environmental performances in the case of the K8 approach and sustainable development performances in the case of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy) and a case study about the selection of sustainable development indicators amongst Municipalities in Scotland, are discussed in the first part of the work. In the second part of the work, the common denominator among subjects consists in the application of spatial indices and indicators to address operational problems in land use management within the territory of the Ravenna province (Italy). The main conclusion of the thesis is that a ‘perfect’ methodological approach which always produces the best results in assessing sustainability performances does not exist. Rather, there is a pool of correct approaches answering different evaluation questions, to be used when methodologies fit the purpose of the analysis. For this reason, methodological limits and conceptual assumptions as well as consistency and transparency of the assessment, become the key factors for assessing the quality of the analysis.

Development of advanced tools and methods for the assessment and management of risk due to atypical major accident scenarios

Proper hazard identification has become progressively more difficult to achieve, as witnessed by several major accidents that took place in Europe, such as the Ammonium Nitrate explosion at Toulouse (2001) and the vapour cloud explosion at Buncefield (2005), whose accident scenarios were not considered by their site safety case. Furthermore, the rapid renewal in the industrial technology has brought about the need to upgrade hazard identification methodologies. Accident scenarios of emerging technologies, which are not still properly identified, may remain unidentified until they take place for the first time. The consideration of atypical scenarios deviating from normal expectations of unwanted events or worst case reference scenarios is thus extremely challenging. A specific method named Dynamic Procedure for Atypical Scenarios Identification (DyPASI) was developed as a complementary tool to bow-tie identification techniques. The main aim of the methodology is to provide an easier but comprehensive hazard identification of the industrial process analysed, by systematizing information from early signals of risk related to past events, near misses and inherent studies. DyPASI was validated on the two examples of new and emerging technologies: Liquefied Natural Gas regasification and Carbon Capture and Storage. The study broadened the knowledge on the related emerging risks and, at the same time, demonstrated that DyPASI is a valuable tool to obtain a complete and updated overview of potential hazards. Moreover, in order to tackle underlying accident causes of atypical events, three methods for the development of early warning indicators were assessed: the Resilience-based Early Warning Indicator (REWI) method, the Dual Assurance method and the Emerging Risk Key Performance Indicator method. REWI was found to be the most complementary and effective of the three, demonstrating that its synergy with DyPASI would be an adequate strategy to improve hazard identification methodologies towards the capture of atypical accident scenarios.

Evaluation of Silver European EEL (anguilla anguilla) for the implementation of an Effective EEL Management plan in Mediterranean Coastal Lagoons

This thesis presents SEELF (Sustainable EEL fishery) Index, a methodology for evaluation of European eel (Anguilla anguilla) for the implementation of an effective Eel Management Plan, as defined by EU Regulation No.1100/2007. SEELF uses internal and external indices, age and blood parameters, and selects suitable specimen for restocking; it is also a reliable tool for eel stock management. In fact, SEELF Index, was developed in two versions: SEELF A, to be used in field operations (catch&release, eel status monitoring) and SEELF B to be used for quality control (food production) and research (eel status monitoring). Health status was evaluated also by biomarker analysis (ChE), and data were compared with age of eel. Age determination was performed with otolith reading and fish scale reading and a calibration between the two methods was possible. The study area was the Comacchio lagoon, a brackish coastal lagoon in Italy, well known as an example of suitable environment for eel fishery, where the capability to use the local natural resources has long been a key factor for a successful fishery management. Comacchio lagoon is proposed as an area where an effective EMP can be performed, in agreement with the main features (management of basins, reduction of mortality due to predators,etc.) highlighted for designation of European Restocking Area (ERA). The ERA is a new concept, proposed as a pillar of a new strategy on eel management and conservation. Furthermore, the features of ERAs can be useful in the framework of European Scale Eel Management Plan (ESEMP), proposed as a European scale implementation of EMP, providing a more effectiveness of conservation measures for eel management.

Development Aid to Water Management in Mali: The Actors, ‘Global’ Paradigms, and ‘Local’ Translations

Development aid involves a complex network of numerous and extremely heterogeneous actors. Nevertheless, all actors seem to speak the same ‘development jargon’ and to display a congruence that extends from the donor over the professional consultant to the village chief. And although the ideas about what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aid have constantly changed over time —with new paradigms and policies sprouting every few years— the apparent congruence between actors more or less remains unchanged. How can this be explained? Is it a strategy of all actors to get into the pocket of the donor, or are the social dynamics in development aid more complex? When a new development paradigm appears, where does it come from and how does it gain support? Is this support really homogeneous? To answer the questions, a multi-sited ethnography was conducted in the sector of water-related development aid, with a focus on 3 paradigms that are currently hegemonic in this sector: Integrated Water Resources Management, Capacity Building, and Adaptation to Climate Change. The sites of inquiry were: the headquarters of a multilateral organization, the headquarters of a development NGO, and the Inner Niger Delta in Mali. The research shows that paradigm shifts do not happen overnight but that new paradigms have long lines of descent. Moreover, they require a lot of work from actors in order to become hegemonic; the actors need to create a tight network of support. Each actor, however, interprets the paradigms in a slightly different way, depending on the position in the network. They implant their own interests in their interpretation of the paradigm (the actors ‘translate’ their interests), regardless of whether they constitute the donor, a mediator, or the aid recipient. These translations are necessary to cement and reproduce the network.

On the Efficiency of the Benchmarks Used in the Asset Management

In this work we studied the efficiency of the benchmarks used in the asset management industry. In chapter 2 we analyzed the efficiency of the benchmark used for the government bond markets. We found that for the Emerging Market Bonds an equally weighted index for the country weights is probably the more suited because guarantees maximum diversification of country risk but for the Eurozone government bond market we found a GDP weighted index is better because the most important matter is to avoid a higher weight for highly indebted countries. In chapter 3 we analyzed the efficiency of a Derivatives Index to invest in the European corporate bond market instead of a Cash Index. We can state that the two indexes are similar in terms of returns, but that the Derivatives Index is less risky because it has a lower volatility, has values of skewness and kurtosis closer to those of a normal distribution and is a more liquid instrument, as the autocorrelation is not significant. In chapter 4 it is analyzed the impact of fallen angels on the corporate bond portfolios. Our analysis investigated the impact of the month-end rebalancing of the ML Emu Non Financial Corporate Index for the exit of downgraded bond (the event). We can conclude a flexible approach to the month-end rebalancing is better in order to avoid a loss of valued due to the benchmark construction rules. In chapter 5 we did a comparison between the equally weighted and capitalization weighted method for the European equity market. The benefit which results from reweighting the portfolio into equal weights can be attributed to the fact that EW portfolios implicitly follow a contrarian investment strategy, because they mechanically rebalance away from stocks that increase in price.

The Impact Of Inward Licensing On New Venture’s Performance. Is inward licensing a winning strategy?

The original idea of the thesis draws on interrelated assumptions: 1) among the tools used, in the markets for technology, for the acquisition of external knowledge, the licensing agreements are acknowledged as one of the most important contractual mechanisms; 2) the liabilities of newness and the liabilities of smallness force new venture to strongly rely on external knowledge sources. Albeit the relevance of this topic, little attention has been paid so far to its investigation, especially in the licensing context; 3) nowadays there is an increasing trend in licensing practices, but the literature on markets for technology focuses almost exclusively on the incentives and rationales that foster firms’ decisions to trade their technologies, under-investigating the role of the acquiring firm, the licensee, overlooking the demand side of the market. Therefore, the thesis investigates the inward licensing phenomenon within the context of new ventures. The main questions that new venture licensee has to address if it decides to undertake an inward licensing strategy, can be summarized as follows: 1) Is convenient for a new venture to choose, as initial technology strategy, the implementation of an inward licensing ? 2) Does this decision affect its survival probabilities? 3) Does the age, at which a new venture becomes a licensee, affect its innovative capabilities? Is it better to undertake a licensing-in strategy soon after founding or to postpone this strategy until the new venture has accumulated significant resources? The findings suggest that new ventures licensees survive less than their non-licensee counterparts; the survival rates are directly connected to the time taken by firms to reach the market;being engaged in licensing-in deals some years after its inception allows a new venture licensee to increase its subsequent capacity to produce innovations.

Development and Validation of a Model-Based Combustion Controller for Water Injection Management

This manuscript reports the overall development of a Ph.D. research project during the “Mechanics and advanced engineering sciences” course at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Bologna. The project is focused on the development of a combustion control system for an innovative Spark Ignited engine layout. In details, the controller is oriented to manage a prototypal engine equipped with a Port Water Injection system. The water injection technology allows an increment of combustion efficiency due to the knock mitigation effect that permits to keep the combustion phasing closer to the optimal position with respect to the traditional layout. At the beginning of the project, the effects and the possible benefits achievable by water injection have been investigated by a focused experimental campaign. Then the data obtained by combustion analysis have been processed to design a control-oriented combustion model. The model identifies the correlation between Spark Advance, combustion phasing and injected water mass, and two different strategies are presented, both based on an analytic and semi-empirical approach and therefore compatible with a real-time application. The model has been implemented in a combustion controller that manages water injection to reach the best achievable combustion efficiency while keeping knock levels under a pre-established threshold. Three different versions of the algorithm are described in detail. This controller has been designed and pre-calibrated in a software-in-the-loop environment and later an experimental validation has been performed with a rapid control prototyping approach to highlight the performance of the system on real set-up. To further make the strategy implementable on an onboard application, an estimation algorithm of combustion phasing, necessary for the controller, has been developed during the last phase of the PhD Course, based on accelerometric signals.

Modelling and Optimization of Energy Management Strategies for Hybrid Vehicles

In the last decades the automotive sector has seen a technological revolution, due mainly to the more restrictive regulation, the newly introduced technologies and, as last, to the poor resources of fossil fuels remaining on Earth. Promising solution in vehicles’ propulsion are represented by alternative architectures and energy sources, for example fuel-cells and pure electric vehicles. The automotive transition to new and green vehicles is passing through the development of hybrid vehicles, that usually combine positive aspects of each technology. To fully exploit the powerful of hybrid vehicles, however, it is important to manage the powertrain’s degrees of freedom in the smartest way possible, otherwise hybridization would be worthless. To this aim, this dissertation is focused on the development of energy management strategies and predictive control functions. Such algorithms have the goal of increasing the powertrain overall efficiency and contextually increasing the driver safety. Such control algorithms have been applied to an axle-split Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle with a complex architecture that allows more than one driving modes, including the pure electric one. The different energy management strategies investigated are mainly three: the vehicle baseline heuristic controller, in the following mentioned as rule-based controller, a sub-optimal controller that can include also predictive functionalities, referred to as Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy, and a vehicle global optimum control technique, called Dynamic Programming, also including the high-voltage battery thermal management. During this project, different modelling approaches have been applied to the powertrain, including Hardware-in-the-loop, and diverse powertrain high-level controllers have been developed and implemented, increasing at each step their complexity. It has been proven the potential of using sophisticated powertrain control techniques, and that the gainable benefits in terms of fuel economy are largely influenced by the chose energy management strategy, even considering the powerful vehicle investigated.

Management Perspectives on Industrial Heritage: an Exploratory Research

The current research project focuses on the analysis of the critical issues of industrial heritage management in Italy and the preservation of organizational history within the reuse projects of former industrial sites. The organizational and managerial perspective is crucial on two levels. Firstly, it is important in the analysis of the original significance of the site, and in particular its organizational history, and its conservation within the new regeneration strategy. Secondly, it is crucial at the phase of management of reuse projects and its feasibility and sustainability analysis. Based on the analysis of the literature, a unique classification of the reuse strategies that can be implemented in order to regenerate former industrial sites has been formulated. The exploratory research thus adapts a multiple case study design. Eight Italian case studies have been chosen, one for each type of regeneration strategy. Each case study is explored as a stand-alone entity through the analysis of the local differences and idiosyncrasies of the specific context, the factors that stood behind the choice of the reuse strategy and the way the reuse project evolved through the years. Then, the current management of each reuse project is analysed. The narration and musealization of the organizational history is investigated through the spatial dimension, the level of content and the level of expression. Secondly, the case studies are compared through a cross-case analysis from three different perspectives: issues on the phase of preparation and implementation of the reuse projects, critical issues behind the current management of new projects and issues on the ways of preservation and narration of organizational history within the new project. The research shows that all regeneration strategies are affected by the conflict between preservation and change, by the issue of materiality and selectivity.

Development of predictive energy management strategies for hybrid electric vehicles supported by connectivity

Nowadays, the spreading of the air pollution crisis enhanced by greenhouse gases emission is leading to the worsening of the global warming. In this context, the transportation sector plays a vital role, since it is responsible for a large part of carbon dioxide production. In order to address these issues, the present thesis deals with the development of advanced control strategies for the energy efficiency optimization of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), supported by the prediction of future working conditions of the powertrain. In particular, a Dynamic Programming algorithm has been developed for the combined optimization of vehicle energy and battery thermal management. At this aim, the battery temperature and the battery cooling circuit control signal have been considered as an additional state and control variables, respectively. Moreover, an adaptive equivalent consumption minimization strategy (A-ECMS) has been modified to handle zero-emission zones, where engine propulsion is not allowed. Navigation data represent an essential element in the achievement of these tasks. With this aim, a novel simulation and testing environment has been developed during the PhD research activity, as an effective tool to retrieve routing information from map service providers via vehicle-to-everything connectivity. Comparisons between the developed and the reference strategies are made, as well, in order to assess their impact on the vehicle energy consumption. All the activities presented in this doctoral dissertation have been carried out at the Green Mobility Research Lab} (GMRL), a research center resulting from the partnership between the University of Bologna and FEV Italia s.r.l., which represents the industrial partner of the research project.

Agroecological management of insect pests on sugarbeets and lettuce cultivated in organic farming

Two-year field trials were conducted in northern Italy with the aim of developing a trapcrop-based agroecological approach for the control of flea beetles (Chaetocnema tibialis (Illiger), Phyllotreta spp. (Chevrolat) (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae)) and Lygus rugulipennis Poppius (Hemiptera: Miridae), key pests of sugar beet and lettuce, respectively. Flea beetle damage trials compared a trap cropping treatment, i.e., a sugar beet plot with a border of Sinapis alba (L.) and Brassica juncea (L.) with a control treatment, i.e., a sugar beet plot with bare soil as field border. Sugar beets grown near trap crops showed a significant decrease (≈40%) in flea beetle damage compared to control. Moreover, flea beetle damage varied with distance from the edge of the trap plants, being highest at 2 m from the edge, then decreasing at higher distances. Regarding L. rugulipennis on lettuce two experiments were conducted. A semiochemical-assisted trap cropping trial was supported by another test evaluating the efficacy of pheromones and trap placement. In this trial, it was found that pheromone baited traps caught significantly more specimens of L. rugulipennis than unbaited traps. It was also found that traps placed at ground level produced larger catches than traps placed at the height of 70 cm. In the semiochemical-assisted trap cropping experiment, a treatment where lettuce was grown next to two Alfa-Alfa borders containing pheromone baited traps was compared with a control treatment, where lettuce was grown near bare soil. This experiment showed that the above-mentioned strategy managed to reduce L. rugulipennis damage to lettuce by ≈30%. From these studies, it appears that trap crop-based strategy, alone or with baited traps, made it possible to reduce crop damage to economically acceptable levels and to minimize the need for insecticide treatments, showing that those strategy could be implemented in organic farming as a means of controlling insect pests.