Erik Franco – Pagina 20 – Progress in Research

The ESPERA project serving the production of PGI Mantua pears

Posted on 29/09/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

The Politecnico di Milano coordinates the project called ESPERA – Economia circolare e sostenibilità della filiera della pera IGP del Mantovano (Circular economy and sustainability of the production of PGI Mantua pears). Initiated last June, this three-year project is financed by the Lombardy Regional Government.

Principal investigator is Prof. Alessandro Torricelli from our Department of Physics. Participants in the study include our Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies at the CNR, the Research Centre for Engineering and Agro-Food Processing at the CREA, and the Università degli Studi di Milano.

The overall goal of the project is to improve the management of the production chain of PGI Mantua pears using a technical and scientific approach based on recent concepts of innovation, collaboration, and circularity as ingredients in a sustainable agriculture system.

The project is characterised by its particular innovative features, which relate to various aspects.

Technological innovation: the use of a multidisciplinary approach that combines a new optical technique (picosecond laser spectroscopy in the near infrared) with an innovative model of kinetics to mature the fruit (biological age) in order to define the ripening indicators to use for selection when the fruit is harvested.

Product and process innovation: recovering scraps through a combined approach entailing the use of fruit with diseases or defects to produce dried rounds of pear — a new product with high nutritional value that extends the remaining life — and using the scraps from producing the rounds to extract nutrient-rich compost.

Business model innovation: The goal of the project is to advance knowledge and demonstrate the feasibility and sustainability of innovative models of the circular economy as applied to the Mantua pear production chain, and the Italian fruit and vegetable industry in general. This entails the development and experimentation of integrated technological solutions and the contextual redesign of management and logistics processes, thereby reconfiguring the production chain to manage food excess and waste.

The project will be carried out in external collaboration with Cooperativa Ortofrutticola, the direct beneficiary of the results. Through this, cultivars and fruit will be selected and existing processes in the production chain will be studied to find solutions to reduce waste, enhance the products, and increase the sustainability of the entire production system. The results of the project will also be transferred to indirect beneficiaries.

DESOLINATION

Posted on 22/09/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

The Horizon 2020 project DESOLINATION aims to design innovative technologies related to both concentrated solar power and desalination, to improve the efficiency of existing concepts. Not only will improvement be made on the independent systems but also on their coupling taking advantage of the mutual interactions and potentialities.

DESOLINATION focuses on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region to test and deploy its technology and in particular this first prototype to be built on the premises of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It is expected that the DESOLINATION prototype will provide low-cost renewable electricity and low-cost fresh water, matching the countries’ requirements for efficient and accessible production of water. The final system will also benefit from a substantial reduction of CO2 emissions from traditional desalination systems.

DESOLINATION will innovate on different fronts. On the concentrated solar side, carbon dioxide blends will be the core of the innovation, leading to more efficient and less expensive power cycles and controllable parameters. On the water side, forward osmosis will be developed and linked to membrane distillation using the wasted heat of the power cycle to generate freshwater. Finally, a unique combination of the power and water cycles will allow the disruptive coupled system to work at high waste-heat-to-freshwater conversion efficiency.

The project, coordinated by Giampiero Manzolini (Department of Energy, Politecnico di Milano) will involve 19 partners from 9 EU countries and 3 GCC countries: 13 high-level universities and research centres (Politecnico di Milano, Fraunhofer Institute, Lund University, Cranfield University, Tekniker, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, University of Brescia, Technical University of Eindhoven, University of Maribor, Luleå University of Technology, King Saud University, University of Bahrain and German University of Technology) will work alongside 3 industrials (Baker Hughes, Cobra and ACSP), and 3 SMEs (Protarget, Temisth and Euroquality).

Cucina collaborativa

Posted on 21/09/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

The ‘Collaborative Kitchen’ project, funded by the European Union in the framework of the ‘New European Bauhaus’ is a project conceived and implemented by the Design Policy Lab (Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano) in partnership with Caritas Reggio Emilia and EIT Food, to increase the circularity of the food donation system through a process of community co-design.

For ten weeks, the Collaborative Kitchen will involve the people of the Caritas food donation system: diners, volunteers and donors, but also policymakers and other value bearers, through a series of conversations and workshops held at Caritas Reggio Emilia and Laboratorio Aperto dei Chiostri di San Pietro. The aim is to imagine the future of food giving and distribution to reduce waste, but also to support people and communities.

How to improve the effectiveness of social information programmes

Posted on 01/09/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

How to improve the effectiveness of social information programs? Such a challenge has been tackled in the paper published on Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, to which contributed Prof. Massimo Tavoni and researcher Jacopo Bonan of the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering.

Social information programmes are widely used by policymakers to nudge behavioural change. These are based on the comparison of individual behaviour with that of a reference group. Their effectiveness strongly depends on household and individual traits. The existing evidence in economics and psychology points to the role of environmental values and identity in determining pro-environmental behaviour and the impact of social information.

Researchers from Politecnico di Milano conducted a large field experiment on household energy conservation, to test whether the impact of a social information programme can be strengthened by leveraging environmental values and identity.

A communication that stimulates environmental self-identity, as well as comparing their energy behaviour with those of other users and with their own in the past, was attached to a certain number of customers’ bills of an electricity supplier. The results in terms of changing energy consumption habits of this group were then compared with those of the group for which neutral communication was maintained.

The results obtained seem to show that stimulating environmental identity does not, on average, strengthen the effectiveness of a social information programme, in terms of reducing energy consumption. However, there is evidence that stimulating environmental identity can lead to reductions in consumption for individuals who have in the past assumed virtuous behaviour from the point of view of energy saving.

TEXTAROSSA

Posted on 30/08/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

TEXTAROSSA is a three-year project coordinated by ENEA and focused on High-Performance Computing (HPC), co-sponsored by the EU and the Italian government through the European High-Performance Computing (EuroHPC) Joint Undertaking.

Involved in the project is the HEAP Lab of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of Politecnico di Milano represented by professors William Fornaciari and Giovanni Agosta, members of the HPC lab of CINI (National Interuniversity Consortium for Informatics). The Lab was one of 16 partners chosen from universities and companies from five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain).

The project involves identifying technological solutions that will enable exascale computing systems of the near future to achieve high performance and high energy efficiency. Exascale class is a computing system capable of performing at least 10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second. The order of magnitude is one billion billion operations.

TEXTAROSSA will have a significant impact on the future evolution of computing systems to achieve exascale-class performance. The consortium will address the challenge from multiple perspectives. It will develop computing accelerators, deploying innovative cooling strategies and introduce green, energy-saving resource management solutions.

Sustainable dam planning: the importance of the filling phase

Posted on 26/08/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Decades of sustainable dam planning efforts have focused on containing dam impacts in regime conditions, when the dam is fully filled and operational, overlooking potential disputes raised by the filling phase.

A study carried out within the DAFNE project and published in Nature Communications argues that filling timing and operations can catalyze most of the conflicts associated with a dam’s lifetime, which can be mitigated by adaptive solutions that respond to medium-to-long term hydroclimatic fluctuations.

The retrospective analysis of the contested recent filling of Gibe III in the Omo-Turkana basin (Ethiopia-Kenya) provides quantitative evidence of the benefits generated by adaptive filling strategies, attaining levels of hydro-power production comparable with the historical ones while curtailing the negative impacts to downstream users.

The results published in the study can inform a more sustainable filling of the new megadam currently under construction downstream of Gibe III or the upcoming filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, and are generalizable to the almost 500 planned dams worldwide in regions influenced by climate feedbacks, thus representing a significant scope to reduce the societal and environmental impacts of a large number of new hydropower reservoirs.

Among the authors of the article there are Marta Zaniolo, PhD, Professor Andrea Castelletti and Professor Matteo Giuliani, from the Departement of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano.

Read The study available online on nature.com

TREASURE

Posted on 25/08/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

TREASURE (leading the TRansion of the European Automotive SUpply chain towards a circulaR futurE) is a Research and Innovation Action (RIA) that aims to offer new testing opportunities for new technologies to make the automotive sector more circular.

Co-funded by the European Commission with the H2020 programme, it is a project coordinated by Sergio Terzi (associate professor) and Paolo Rosa from the Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Department at the Politecnico di Milano.

Its main objectives are:

to guarantee sustainable use of raw materials in the automotive sector reducing the risks linked to supplies;
to apply the circular economy paradigm to the automotive sector, acting as examples for the manufacturing macrosector;
to deliver better economic, environmental and social performance for vehicles for all users;
to create new supply chains around end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), focusing on the circular use of raw materials.

In this way, TREASURE will deliver tangible support for companies in the automotive sector, providing a practical demonstration of the benefits obtainable from the application of the circular economy paradigm, from the point of view of both business and supply chains and also of technology and sustainability, through the adoption of industry 4.0 technologies in the management processes of ELVs and their parts.

The primary results expected include:

the development of an AI-based tool for analysis and comparison of possible circular supply chains in the automotive sector;
the realisation of a series of successful cases for key players in the management of ELVs, such as car wreckers, scrap metal shredding plants, raw material recycling plants and vehicle manufacturers;
the integration of key enabling technologies for the design, dismantling and efficient sustainable recycling of electronic auto parts.

Partners in the project, coordinated by the Politecnico di Milano, are the Dutch research centre TNO, Zaragoza University in Spain, the professional school at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, the Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, the Dutch consultancy agency Material Recycling and Sustainability B.V., the Estonian company for social studies Edgeryders OU, the Lithuanian LCD screen manufacturer EUROLCDS SIA, the Spanish auto parts manufacturer Walter Pack SL, the vehicle demolition company Pollini Lorenzo e Figli Srl, the leading Spanish car manufacturer SEAT SA, the software developers TXT E-Solutions Spa, the Spanish scrap metal recycling company Industrias Lopez Soriano SA, the Italian National Unification Body, and the French automotive cluster NEXTMOVE.

The TREASURE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101003587.

CLINT – CLimate INTelligence

Posted on 21/08/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Reducing the impact of extreme climate events, identifying adaptation and mitigation strategies and managing the risks associated with such events is a challenge: climate services, which today can benefit from an incomparable amount of data, are particularly important in supporting strategic decisions.

The CLINT project – CLimate INTelligence, which is funded by the Horizon 2020 programme, aims to provide a tool to better harness the potential of this data. The main objective is the development of an artificial intelligence framework based on machine learning techniques and algorithms capable of processing large climate datasets in order to support climatological studies in the tracking, causal analysis and classification of extreme events such as tropical cyclones, heat waves, tropical nights and extreme droughts, but also of compound events and competing extremes.

Specifically, the framework will support the identification of spatial-temporal patterns and evolutionary dynamics of climatological fields associated with extreme events; the physics-based validation of climate system cause-effect relationships discovered by machine learning algorithms; the quantification of past and future extreme events by greenhouse gas emissions and other man-made forces.

The framework will also study the impact of extreme events on different socio-economic sectors under historical, predicted and projected climate conditions, developing innovative and sectoral climate services powered by artificial intelligence. These services will be tested on different spatial scales, from pan-European – where they will support EU policies related to the water-energy-food nexus (Water-Energy-Food Nexus) – to local, in three different types of climate hotspots.

Lastly, the services that are developed within the project will be made operational according to the most advanced open data and software standards in terms of Climate Services Information Systems and Web Processing Services, as well as a demonstration prototype of some of these services, in order to facilitate the understanding of the project results by public and private research bodies.

The project is coordinated by the Politecnico di Milano and led by Professor Andrea Castelletti of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, as Scientific Coordinator.

Research and training in the ELO-X project

Posted on 18/08/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

The Politecnico di Milano is a partner in the ELO-X project, which aims to develop advanced optimisation and machine learning techniques for industrial systems, while training 15 PhD holders to guide their development and technology transfer processes.

ELO-X has a duration of four years and is funded by the European Commission within the framework of the prestigious Marie Skłodowska Curie projects with a contribution of 4.5 million euro.

The project is coordinated by the University of Freiburg and involves ETH Zurich, Politecnico di Milano, It will train 3 of the 15 funded researchers, and include other prestigious universities and companies, such as: EPF Lausanne, KU Leuven, Politecnico di Bucarest, Bosch, Siemens Industrial Software, Atlas-Copco, Tool-TEMP, and Italian startup ODYS Srl.

The next generation of intelligent control systems will be able to learn the behaviour of the process to be regulated from data streams and make optimal decisions in real time, leading to improved performance, safety and energy efficiency.

say Lorenzo Fagiano and Riccardo Scattolini of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering (DEIB), supervisors of two of the funded PhD students.

These features are crucial for the future development of systems that will change our society, such as autonomous vehicles, intelligent energy systems and domestic robots.

Politecnico di Milano’s research unit, the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, will develop recurrent neural networks in predictive control strategies. This enables machine learning techniques in safety-critical applications and methods to systematically design multi-level control architectures for autonomous systems, where numerical optimisation and machine learning are employed at different time scales and with varying priorities between interacting levels of hierarchy.

These methods will be applied to innovative technologies, such as rotary-wing drones for civil applications and airborne wind energy systems, civil and industrial applications, and the optimisation of complex building climate control systems.

The ETH Zurich research group, of the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, will develop optimisation-based decision-making algorithms that can adapt to new data and information in changing environments while balancing the needs for environmental exploration and performance improvement and ensuring safety during operation. The algorithms developed will be implemented with efficient techniques and used in innovative applications, such as autonomous vehicle driving.

To fulfil this potential, it is necessary to develop machine learning and optimisation methods capable of operating in industrial applications and ensuring high safety standards.

Fagiano and Scattolini added.

This, in turn, requires the training of qualified researchers, not only in scientific/technical fields, but also in how to transfer new solutions to industry.

Milano Gallaratese: third neighbourhood hub to combat food waste

Posted on 16/08/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Work on the renovation of the third Neighbourhood Hub against food wastage in Gallaratese (Municipality 8 of Milan) has been completed, and it is opening with two new features: in addition to the collection and redistribution of surpluses, it also brings with it a fair trade market and educational and training activities for women and children in need.

The new hub joins the two already active in the Isola (Municipality 9) and Lambrate (Municipality 3) neighbourhoods, which guarantee the recovery and redistribution of around 20 tonnes of food per month (equal to 40,000 meals).

The project was founded in 2016, as part of the actions defined in the ‘Zero Sprechi’ protocol, promoted by the Municipality of Milan, Politecnico di Milano, Fondazione Cariplo and Assolombarda Food Group.

The new hub will be a meeting point for the members of the Gallaratese neighbourhood, thanks to the new concept that integrates diverse groups, designed to enhance social inclusion through food support and assistance. Areal added value for the whole area, that is going to redevelop a neglected space and will be part of an already existing network of very lively and creative associations, which have made an extraordinary work in these months of pandemic.

In addition to the initiative’s long-standing partners, this opening was made possible thanks to a contribution of 75,000 euros from the Fondazione Milan, resulting from the “Derby Together” initiative, which made it possible to renovate the Milan City Council’s space in Via Appennini 50.

The new multi-purpose space will be managed by the Terre des Hommes Foundation, which is already part of the new Food Aid System in Municipalities 7 and 8. Their fellow participants will be IBVA for the fair trade market, the Milan Committee of the Italian Red Cross, Rimaflow, STAG, the QuBì network in Gallaratese, Mitades, Paloma 2000, Mamme a Scuola and the Global Thinking Foundation. Additionally, the help of volunteers will be invaluable to ensure a permanent presence at the Hub and continuity of service.

As in the other Neighbourhood Hubs, the organisational model is developed by the Politecnico di Milano.

We are working with the other partners to try out a new management model in the Gallaratese area and to improve existing hubs through the active involvement of donor companies and the continuous monitoring of processes and the results achieved, in order to respond more effectively to the emerging needs of the urban population.

explains Marco Melacini, Scientific Director of the Food Sustainability Observatory of the Politecnico’s School of Management.