Energy and Sustainability in Museums. The Plant Refurbishment of the Medieval Building of Palagio di Parte Guelfa in Florence

This paper presents a performance-based design of a HVAC plant and controller system of the “Palagio di Parte Guelfa” Palace, a medieval building converted into a museum in the city of Firenze. Transient simulations to evaluate the internal microclimate conditions during the year for the building and the different system plant were carried out. A comparison between the indoor microclimatic parameters obtained and the values suggested by the standards on protection and conservation of historical works of art, suggested a non-invasive and reversible plant system solution. The MuseumofHistorical Footballbuilding portion is the case study. The proposed plant, a constant air flow system coupled with radiant panels dry mounted above the existing flooring, was simulated throughout the year under transient conditions to evaluate its energy performance. This solution ensures indoor temperature and humidity values suitable for the conservation of works of art and visitor comfort. It is an example of a possible course of action for a plant refurbishment in a historic building converted into a museum, located in climatic regions characterized by high thermal and solar loads. The present paper concerns the study of an integrated and reversible architectural-plant solution proposed: reversibility of the proposed system is understood as the possibility for the present conditions being easily restored.

A quantitative analysis of the US materials flow methodology and comparison to the EU methodology for MSW statistics

The European Union(EU)and the United States(US)determine municipal solid waste(MSW)statistics differently.The EU applies a site-specific methodology that directly measures waste whereas the US employs a materials flow methodology that estimates MSW statistics indirectly based on production and recovery data from industries.This study dissects the materials flow methodology and presents quantitative materials flow Sankey diagrams for the primary MSW materials to highlight data gaps that can be addressed to improve the methodology’s accuracy.Private industry plastics data were applied to the materials flow methodology,and the results were within 10%of the plastics statistics reported by the US Environmental Protection Agency(US EPA).Drawbacks to the methodologies include EU measurement inaccuracies due to double-counting and not accounting for residual waste in the US.The latter may partially explain why landfilling tonnages reported by the US EPA were approximately 60%less than the tonnages reported by the Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council(WTERT)in its national MSW survey that applied the EU methodology in the US.Unlike the EU,there is no US national policy that requires states to measure and report state-level waste data to the US EPA.Future improvements in US MSW statistics rely heavily on the implementation of national policies to homogenize the measurement and collection of waste data from states.

Development of X-band accelerating structures for high gradients

Short copper standing wave （SW） structures operating at an X-band frequency have been recently designed and manufactured at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare （INFN） using the vacuum brazing technique. High power tests of the structures have been performed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In this manuscript we report the results of these tests and the activity in progress to enhance the high gradient performance of the next generation of structures, particularly the technological characterization of high performance coatings obtained via molybdenum sputtering.

High Level Languages Implementation and Analysis of 3D Navier-Stokes Solvers

In this work we introduce PRIN-3D(PRoto-code for Internal flows modeled by Navier-Stokes equations in 3-Dimensions),a new high level algebraic language(Matlab^(■))based code,by discussing some fundamental aspects regarding its basic solving kernel and by describing the design of an innovative advection scheme.The main focus was on designing a memory and computationally efficient code that,due to the typical conciseness of the Matlab coding language,could allow for fast and effective implementation of new models or algorithms.Innovative numerical methods are discussed in the paper.The pressure equation is derived with a quasi-segregation technique leading to an iterative scheme obtained within the framework of a global preconditioning procedure.Different levels of parallelization are obtainable by exploiting special pressure variable ordering patterns that lead to a block-structured Poisson-like matrix.Moreover,the new advection scheme has the potential of a controllable artificial diffusivity.Preliminary results are shown including a fully three-dimensional internal laminar flow evolving in a relatively complex geometry and a 3D methane-air flame simulated with the aid of libraries based on the Flamelet model.