Academic literature on the topic 'Politecnico di Bari'

A new experimental campaign on a 2D movable-bed physical model, reproducing a typical nourishment sandy beach profile, is being carried out in the wave flume of the Laboratory of Coastal Engineering at Politecnico di Bari (Bari, Italy). The main aim is to assess the short-term evolution of a sandy beach nourishment, relying on a mixed solution built on the deployment of a Beach Drainage System (BDS) and a rubble-mound detached submerged breakwater. This paper aims at illustrating the experimental findings. Tests presented herein deal with both unprotected and protected configurations, focusing on the hydrodynamic and morphodynamic processes under erosive conditions. Results show that, with respect to the unprotected conditions, BDS reduces the shoreline retreat and the beach steepen within swash and surf zone as well. Moreover, a reduction of net sediment transport rate is observed. When BDS is coupled with the submerged sill, a reversal of the prevalent direction of the net sediment transport seaward occurs offshore the sheltered region. Less considerable positive effects on shoreline retreat are induced by the submerged structure, whereas the mean beach slope remains quite stable. Secondary effects of drain on the submerged sill performance are also highlighted. BDS reduces wave-induced setup on beach, by mitigating the mean water level raising, typically experienced by such structures.

Il Beach Drainage System (BDS) è un metodo per la protezione delle coste a basso impatto ambientale basato sul drenaggio della “water table” in corrispondenza della spiaggia emersa subito a monte della linea di riva. L’effetto drenante tende a incrementare il processo di deposito del materiale trasportato dal moto ondoso di run-up e, quindi, a favorire il ripascimento della spaigia, ovvero a contrastarne l’erosione. Il sistema è ancora oggetto di ricerca. Non è ancora chiaro come la geometria dei dreni e la loro posizione, nonché il moto ondoso incidente influiscano sugli effetti del drenaggio. Anche l’evoluzione morfologica ha una sua notevole influenza. Le considerazioni riportate in questo lavoro sono relative ad alcuni aspetti di una vasta ricerca sperimentale in corso presso il Laboratorio di Ricerca e Sperimentazione per la Difesa delle Coste (LIC) del Politecnico di Bari. E’ stato osservato che l’influenza del moto ondoso incidente deriva soprattutto dall’entità del set-up sottocosta. La oscillazioni della water table sottoposta all’azione del moto ondoso sono legate alle componenti alle basse frequenze del moto ondoso; infatti si riscontrano periodi di oscillazione propri del surf-beat. La quota più alta della W.T. si ottiene in corrispondenza del punto di massima elongazione del run-up e, quando il dreno è in funzione, la quota della W.T risulta maggiormente depressa per gli attacchi ondosi meno energetici. Al crescere dell’energia d’onda incidente aumentano di valore sia la quota della W.T. che la portata emunta. L’incremento di altezza della W.T. non sembra aumentare con una progressione lineare, piuttosto tende verso una situazione di saturazione.

Recommender systems are ubiquitous. Our digital lives are influenced by their use when, for instance, we select the news to read, the product to buy, the friend to connect with, and the movie to watch. While enormous academic research efforts have been mainly focused on getting high-quality recommendations to reach maximum user satisfaction, little effort has been devoted to studying the integrity and security of these systems. Is there an underlying relationship between the characteristics of the historical user-item interactions and the efficacy of injection of false users/feedback strategies against collaborative models? Can public semantic data be used to perform attacks more potent in raising the recommendability of victim items? Can a malicious user poison or evade the image data of visual recommenders with adversarial perturbed product images? Is the family of model-based recommenders more vulnerable to multi-step gradient-based adversarial perturbations? Furthermore, is the adversarial training robustification still effective in the last scenario? Is this training defense influencing the beyond-accuracy and bias performance? This dissertation intends to pave the way towards more robust recommender systems, beginning with understanding how to robustify a model, what is the cost of robustness in terms of reduction of recommendation accuracy, and which are the novel adversarial risks of modern recommenders. This thesis, getting inspiration from the literature on the security of collaborative models against the insertion of hand-engineered fake profiles and the recent advances of adversarial machine learning methods in other research areas like computer vision, contributes to several directions: (i) the proposal of a practical framework to interpret the impact of data characteristics on the robustness of collaborative recommenders [Deldjoo et al., 2020], (ii) the design of powerful attack strategies using publicly available semantic data [Anelli et al., 2020], (iii) the identification of severe adversarial vulnerabilities of visual-based recommender models where adversaries can break the recommendation integrity by pushing products to the highest recommendation positions with a simple and human-imperceptible perturbation of products' images [Anelli et al., 2021b], (iv) the proposal of robust adversarial perturbation methods capable of completely breaking the accuracy of matrix factorization recommenders [Anelli et al., 2021a], and (v) a formal study that examines the effects of adversarial training in reducing the recommendation quality of state-of-the-art model-based recommenders Anelli et al. [2021c]. Awarded by: Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy on 24 January 2022. Supervised by: Tommaso DI Noia. Available at: https://iris.poliba.it/retrieve/dd89f8a6-faa4-ccdd-e053-6605fe0a1b87/Adversarial_Machine_Learning_in_Recommender_Systems.pdf.

The paper presents a software dedicated to the elaboration of point clouds, called <i>Intelligent Cloud Viewer</i> (ICV), made in-house by AESEI software (Spin-Off of Politecnico di Bari), allowing to view point cloud of several tens of millions of points, also on of “no” very high performance systems. The elaborations are carried out on the whole point cloud and managed by means of the display only part of it in order to speed up rendering. It is designed for 64-bit Windows and is fully written in C ++ and integrates different specialized modules for computer graphics (Open Inventor by SGI, Silicon Graphics Inc), maths (BLAS, EIGEN), computational geometry (CGAL, <i>Computational Geometry Algorithms Library</i>), registration and advanced algorithms for point clouds (PCL, <i>Point Cloud Library</i>), advanced data structures (BOOST, <i>Basic Object Oriented Supporting Tools</i>), etc. ICV incorporates a number of features such as, for example, cropping, transformation and georeferencing, matching, registration, decimation, sections, distances calculation between clouds, etc. It has been tested on photographic and TLS (<i>Terrestrial Laser Scanner</i>) data, obtaining satisfactory results. The potentialities of the software have been tested by carrying out the photogrammetric survey of the Castel del Monte which was already available in previous laser scanner survey made from the ground by the same authors. For the aerophotogrammetric survey has been adopted a flight height of approximately 1000ft AGL (<i>Above Ground Level</i>) and, overall, have been acquired over 800 photos in just over 15 minutes, with a covering not less than 80%, the planned speed of about 90 knots.

Review of European Studies wishes to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Their help and contributions in maintaining the quality of the journal are greatly appreciated. Review of European Studies is recruiting reviewers for the journal. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, we welcome you to join us. Please find the application form and details at http://recruitment.ccsenet.org and e-mail the completed application form to res@ccsenet.org. Reviewers for Volume 12, Number 1 Alejandra Moreno Alvarez, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain Antonio Messeni Petruzzelli, Politecnico di Bari, Italy Arthur Becker-Weidman, Center For Family Development, USA Aziollah Arbabisarjou, Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Iran Eugenia Panitsides, University of Macedonia, Greece Federico De Andreis, University Giustino Fortunato, Italy Florin Ionita, The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Romania Frantisek Svoboda, Masaryk University, Czech republic Gabriela Gruber, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania Gevisa La Rocca, University of Enna &ldquo;Kore&rdquo;, Italy Ghaiath M. A. Hussein, University of Birmingham, UK G&uuml;lce Başer, Boğazi&ccedil;i University, Tukey Ifigeneia Vamvakidou, University of Western Macedonia, Greece Indrajit Goswami, N. L. Dalmia Institute of Management Studies and Research, India Ioan-Gheorghe Rotaru, &lsquo;Timotheus&rsquo; Brethren Theological Institute of Bucharest, Romania Julia Stefanova, Economic Research Institute &ndash; The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria Karen Ferreira-Meyers, University of Swaziland, Swaziland Maria Pescaru, University of Pitești, ROMANIA Montserrat Crespi Vallbona, University of Barcelona, Spain Muhammad Saud, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia Natalija Vrecer, independent researcher, Slovenia Nunzia Di Cristo Bertali, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom Serdar Yilmaz, World Bank, USA Skaidrė Žičkienė, &Scaron;iauliai University, Lithuania Szabolcs Blazsek, Universidad Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala Tryfon Korontzis, Hellenic National School of Local Government, Greece Valeria Vannoni, University of Perugia, Italy Vicenta Gisbert, Universidad de La Laguna, Spain

Environmental Management and Sustainable Development (EMSD) would like to thank the following reviewers for reviewing manuscripts from May 1, 2021, to August 1, 2021. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Many authors, regardless of whether EMSD publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Macrothink Institute appreciates the following reviewers’ rigorous and conscientious efforts for this journal. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review during this period. Adriano Magliocco, University of Genoa, ItalyAristotulus Ernst Tungka, University of Sam Ratulangi Manado, IndonesiaChristiane do Nascimento Monte, Universidade Federal Fluminense, BrazilChuck Chuan Ng, Xiamen University Malaysia, MalaysiaDastun Gabriel Msuya, Sokoine University Of Agriculture, TanzaniaGiacomo Chiesa, Politecnico di Torino, ItalyJephias Mapuva, Bindura University, ZimbabweJoão Fernando Pereira Gomes, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, PortugueseMd. Nuralam Hossain, Chongqing University, ChinaOylum Gokkurt Baki, Sinop University, TurkeyPankaj Maheshwari, University of Nevada, USATateda Masafumi, Toyama Prefectural University, Japan

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> While public participation in scientific achievements has a long history, the last decades have seen more attention and an impressive increase in the number of involved people. Citizen science, the term used for denoting such an attitude, is a very diverse practice, encompassing various forms, depths, and aims of collaboration between scientists and citizen researchers and a broad range of scientific disciplines. Different classifications of citizen science projects exist based on the degrees of influence and contributions of citizens. Haklay, Mazumdar, and Wardlaw (2018) distinguish the citizen science projects in three different classes:</p> <ol><li>Long-running citizen science, which are the traditional ones, the projects similar to those run in the past (Koboriet al., 2016; Bonney et al., 2009)</li> <li>Citizen cyberscience, strictly connected with the use of technologies (Grey, 2009) and which can be subclassified in:<ol><li>volunteer computing, where citizens offer the unused computing resources of their computers;</li><li>volunteer thinking, where citizens offer their cognitive abilities for performing tasks difficult for machines;</li><li>passive sensing, where citizens use the sensors integrated into mobile computing devices to carry outautomatic sensing tasks.</li></ol></li> <li>Community science, involving a more significant commitment of citizens also in designing and planning theproject activities in a more egalitarian (if not bottom-up) approach between scientists and citizen scientists(Jepson &amp; Ladle, 2015; Nascimento, Guimarães Pereira, &amp; Ghezzi, 2014; Breen, Dosemagen, Warren, &amp;Lippincott, 2015), which can be divided into:<ol><li>participatory sensing, where citizens use the sensors integrated into mobile computing devices to carry outsensing tasks;</li><li>Do It Yourself (DIY) science, which implies participants create their scientific tools and methodology to carry out their researches; </li><li>civic science, “which is explicitly linked to community goals and questions the state of things” (Haklay et al., 2018).</li></ol></li></ol> <p>The work presented here is of interest of community scientists which voluntarily offer their time for the development of scientific projects. Many software tools have been developed in order to simplify the insertion of data into structured forms and the aggregation and analysis of the obtained data. In recent years, the growing availability of feature-rich and low-cost smartphones have boosted the development of innovative solutions for data collection using portable devices. In this field, ODK (OpenDataKit) is widely known. It is an open-source suite of tools focused on simplicity of use, which includes an Android application for data collection. We used ODK for the first applications we developed.</p><p>One of the applications we developed using ODK is Via Regina (http://www.viaregina.eu/app). The application aims to support slow tourism in Via Regina, which is a road that overlooks the west coast of Lake Como in Northern Italy. Over the centuries, Via Regina has been a critical trade and pilgrim route in Europe. Moreover, from this road, a compact system of slow mobility paths departs, which span the mountainous region at the border between Italy and Switzerland. This region is rich in culture, regarding history, art, architecture, cuisine and people’s lifestyle. Considering collecting data on Via Regina and the paths around it would enable to rediscover and promote its culture while enjoying the territory, an Interreg project named “The Paths of Regina” started. The application developed within this project allows collecting data in predefined types: historical and cultural, morphological, touristic, and critical. Moreover, while reporting a point of interest (POI), the application asks the name, the position (through GPS or an interactive map), a picture, and optionally a video and an audio record of it (Antonovic et al., 2015).</p><p>However, since ODK application can be used only on Android devices, we developed a cross-platform application to collect similar data for the same purpose. It is available on Android, iOS, and web (http://viaregina3.como.polimi.it/app/). The application is developed using Apache Cordova, which is a mobile application development framework that enables running the application in multiple platforms. Leaflet library is used for web mapping. The data is stored in NoSQL PouchDB and CouchDB database, which enables both online and offline data collection. While reporting a POI, the application asks for its type, the user’s rating, a comment, and a picture of it either uploaded from device’s storage or taken using the camera of the mobile device. In addition to being cross-platform, it has the advantage of displaying and enabling the query of POIs reported, compared to the ODK-based version (Brovelli, Kilsedar, &amp; Zamboni, 2016). Regarding citizen science, besides the citizens using these two applications, Iubilantes, a voluntary cultural organization, has been involved in the project as community scientists. Iubilantes created slow mobility paths to walk in and around Via Regina, using their experience gained through studying ancient paths while protecting and enhancing their assets since 1996.</p><p>Mobile data collection can also be used to compensate for the lack of reference data available for land cover validation. We developed the Land Cover Collector (https://github.com/kilsedar/land-cover-collector) application for this purpose, which collects data using the nomenclature of GlobeLand30. GlobeLand30 is the first global land cover map at 30-meter resolution, provided by National Geomatics Center of China, available for 2000 and 2010 (Chen et al., 2015). There are ten land cover classes in the GlobeLand30 dataset, which are: artificial surface, bare land, cultivated land, forest, grassland, permanent snow and ice, shrubland, tundra, water body, and wetland. The collected data will be used for validating GlobeLand30 (Kilsedar, Bratic, Molinari, Minghini, &amp; Brovelli, 2018). The data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 and can be downloaded within the application in JSON format. The application is currently available in eight languages: English, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, French and Spanish. The technologies used are the same as the cross-platform Via Regina application. As a result, it is available on Android, iOS, and web (https://landcover.como.polimi.it/collector/); and it supports display and query of the collected data. While reporting a POI, the application asks the land cover class of it, the user’s degree of certainty on the correctness of the stated class, photos in north, east, south and west directions, and the user’s comment. Three hands-on workshops were given to teach this application and various ways to validate GlobeLand30: the first on September 1, 2018 at the World Bank in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (in conjunction with the FOSS4G 2018 conference); the second on September 3, 2018 at the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Nairobi, Kenya; and the third on October 1, 2018 at the Delft University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands. The workshops, run by representatives of the project's principal investigators &amp;ndash; Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the National Geomatics Center of China (China) &amp;ndash; were attended by a total of 100 people with a background in GIS and remote sensing. (Brovelli et al., 2018).</p><p>Nonetheless, there are no widely adopted cross-platform open-source solutions or systems for on-site surveys that address the problem of information silos: isolated databases, where the information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system, which is an obstacle to using data mining to make productive use of data of multiple systems.</p><p> PSAB (Participatory Sensing App Builder) is a platform that provides an open-source and easy to use cross-platform solution for the creation of custom smartphone applications as well as web applications and catalog service for publishing the data and make them available to everyone. It takes advantage of established standards (like XLSForm for defining the structure of the form and DublinCore for exposing metadata) as well as less known yet effective solutions, like WQ (https://wq.io), a framework developed for building reusable software platforms for citizen science. These technologies have been merged, together with other software like Django, PyCSW, PostgreSQL, in a single solution, in order to assist the user during the entire process, from the definition of the form structure, to the creation of an ad-hoc application and the publication of the collected data, inside a flexible and open-source platform.</p><p> Users registered to PSAB are allowed to create a new application by filling a web form where they can upload their XLSForm files and submit the metadata describing the data to be collected. A new application for collecting data on the field is generated and accessible via web and Android (while iOS requires a particular setup), ready to be used online and offline. The creator of each application is also the administrator of it, which means he/she is allowed to add or ban users and modify or remove existing data. Data is automatically synchronized between all the users participating in the project.</p><p> In the presentation we will show the applications we developed, starting from the ODK-based ones and coming to the PSAB application builder, and our experience related to their usage.</p>

AbstractWe propose an innovative use of the Leiden Rankings (LR) in institutional management. Although LR only consider research output of major universities reported in Web of Science (WOS) and share the limitations of other existing rankings, we show that they can be used as a base of a heuristic approach to identify “outlying” institutions that perform significantly below or above expectations. Our approach is a non-rigorous intuitive method (“heuristic”) because is affected by all the biases due to the technical choices and incompleteness that affect the LR but offers the possibility to discover interesting findings to be systematically verified later. We propose to use LR as a departure base on which to apply statistical analysis and network mapping to identify “outlier” institutions to be analyzed in detail as case studies. Outliers can inform and guide science policies about alternative options. Analyzing the publications of the Politecnico di Bari in more detail, we observe that “small teams” led by young and promising scholars can push the performance of a university up to the top of the LR. As argued by Moed (Applied evaluative informetrics. Springer International Publishing, Berlin, 2017a), supporting “emerging teams”, can provide an alternative to research support policies, adopted to encourage virtuous behaviours and best practices in research. The results obtained by this heuristic approach need further verification and systematic analysis but may stimulate further studies and insights on the topics of university rankings policy, institutional management, dynamics of teams, good research practice and alternative funding methods.

07–154Bello, Richard (Sam Houston State U, USA; bello@shsu.edu), Causes and paralinguistic correlates of interpersonal equivocation. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.9 (2006), 1430–1441.07–155Bosco, Francesca M. (Università e Politecnico di Torino, Italy; bosco@psych.unito.it), Monica Bucciarelli & Bruno G. Bara, Recognition and repair of communicative failures: A developmental perspective. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.9 (2006), 1398–1429.07–156Braber, Natalie (U Manchester, UK; natalie.braber@ntu.ac.uk), Emotional and emotive language: Modal particles and tags in unified Berlin. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.9 (2006), 1487–1503.07–157Curl, Traci S. (U York, UK; tsc3@york.ac.uk), Offers of assistance: Constraints on syntactic design. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.8 (2006), 1257–1280.07–158Hussey, Karen A. (U Western Ontario, Canada) & Albert N. Katz, Metaphor production in online conversation: Gender and friendship status. Discourse Processes (Erlbaum) 42.1 (2006), 75–98.07–159Ishida, Kazutoh (U Hawaii at Manoa, USA; kazutoh@1994.jukuin.keio.ac.jp), How can you be so certain? The use of hearsay evidentials by English-speaking learners of Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.8 (2006), 1281–1304.07–160Lipovsky, Caroline (U Sydney, Australia; Caroline.Lipovsky@arts.usyd.edu.au), Candidates' negotiation of their expertise in job interviews. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.8 (2006), 1147–1174.07–161Mori, J. (U Wisconsin-Madison, USA; jmori@wisc.edu), The workings of the Japanese token hee in informing sequences: An analysis of sequential context, turn shape, and prosody. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.8 (2006), 1175–1205.07–162Schegloff, Emanuel A. (U California, Los Angeles, USA; schegloff@soc.ucla.edu) & Gonen Hacohen, On the preference for minimization in referring to persons: Evidence from Hebrew conversation. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.8 (2006), 1305–1312.07–163Wang, Jinjun (Yunnan U, China), Questions and the exercise of power. Discourse & Society (Sage) 17.4 (2006), 529–548.07–164Wouk, Fay (U Auckland, New Zealand; f.wouk@auckland.ac.nz), The language of apologizing in Lombok, Indonesia. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.9 (2006), 1457–1486.

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on the world’s healthcare infrastructure as well as its social, economic, and psychological well-being. In particular, Italy’s unexpectedly high COVID-19 case and death rate from March to June, 2020, captured headlines due to its speed and virulence. Many governments are currently implementing measures to help contain and slow down the spread of COVID-19. The Social Response to Covid-19 Smart Dashboard was built by researchers at the Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age at San Diego State University and Politecnico di Milano. This dashboard provides an aggregated view of what people in 10 Italian metropolitan cities (Milan, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Bari, Palermo, and Cagliari) tweet during the pandemic by monitoring social media behaviors in the north, center, south, and islands. Moreover, the dashboard is a geo-targeted search tool for Twitter messages to monitor the diffusion of information and social behavior changes which provides an automatic procedure to help researchers to: associate tweets based on geography differences, filter noises such as removing redundant retweets and using machine learning methods to improve precisions, analyze social media data from a spatiotemporal perspective, and visualize social media data in various aspects such as weekly trends, top urls, top retweets, top mentions, and top hashtags. The Social Response to Covid-19 SMART Dashboard provides a useful tool for policy makers, city planners, research organizations, and health officials to monitor real-time societal perceptions using social media.

The themes of reduce, recycle, reuse are at the heart of the challenges that the global society of the XXI century is facing. At the same time, more than two-thirds of the world population lives in cities nominating the latters to play a central role in the near future. For this reason, the search for a methodology for the redevelopment of the historical urban fabrics appears today extremely interesting. Complexity, richness and stratification of the latters make them definitely the most convincing test to set a scientific strategy for the project of urban transformations. But stratification means complexity and complex are the phenomena that characterize the XXI century society. The only convincing way then for the analysis of these phenomena is that of the multi-disciplinarity. The proposed methodology is structured, thus, around a number of disciplines (Urban Morphology, Sustainability, Urban Regulation, Economic Evaluation and Urban Design) on which to set the reading of the urban fabric with special attention to the so called “urban voids” namely all those situations in which the tissue is interrupted due to slumping and demolitions. This aspect is very important because if, on the one hand, it is in these areas where key tissue analysis problems can be seen, on the other hand, it is always from these areas that the main urban, social and economical transformation opportunities can take boot. A Due Diligence of the “urban voids” organised in datasheets/base (for each area) concludes the analysis. The different disciplinary fields work then in a complementary way within a single methodological approach laying the scientific basis for the interventions of urban regeneration within the historic fabric of Valencia. References Gherri, B. (2016) ‘Environmental Analysis Towards Low Carbon Urban Retrofitting For Public Spaces’, Proceedings of HERITAGE 2016 – 5th International Conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development,Vol. 1, p. 499-508. Gherri, B. (2016) ‘Environmental Assessment method for Decarbonised Urban renewal’, NewDist: SBE16 Towards Post-Carbon Cities, vol. 2, p. 114-122. Guarini, M.R. Buccarini C., Battisti F., (2015)‘Valutazione della fattibilità tecnica economica di un intervento di recupero edilizio’, Estimo: temi e questioni contemporanee, (Politecnico di Bari, Bari). Maretto, M. (2015) ‘Polarities, Paths, Fabrics. The role of urban morphology in contemporary Urban Design’, U+D urbanform and design 03/04, 46-65. Maretto, M. (2008) Il Paesaggio delle differenze (ETS Edizioni, Pisa).

This paper concerns the acoustic analysis of self–sustained thermoacoustic pressure oscillations that occur in a test rig equipped with full scale lean premixed burner. The experimental work is conducted by Ansaldo Energia and CCA (Centro Combustione Ambiente) at the Ansaldo Caldaie facility in Gioia del Colle (Italy), in cooperation with Politecnico di Bari. The test rig is characterized by a longitudinal development with two acoustic volumes, plenum and combustion chamber, coupled by the burner. The length of both chambers can be varied with continuity in order to obtain instability at different frequencies. A previously developed three dimensional finite element code has been applied to carry out the linear stability analysis of the system, modelling the thermoacoustic combustion instabilities through the Helmholtz equation under the hypothesis of low Mach approximation. The heat release fluctuations are modelled according to the κ-τ approach. The burner, characterized by two conduits for primary and secondary air, is simulated by means of both a FEM analysis and a Burner Transfer Matrix (BTM) method in order to examine the influence of details of its actual geometry. Different operating conditions, in which self–sustained pressure oscillations have been observed, are examined. Frequencies and growth rates of unstable modes are identified, with good agreement with experimental data in terms of frequencies and acoustics pressure wave profiles.

The InTenso+ system has been developed at Politecnico di Milano (Technical University of Milan) for the measurement of the centre of gravity location and of the inertia tensor of vehicles and their components (such as gearboxes and engines). The test rig is basically a multi-bar pendulum carrying the body under investigation and oscillating from well-known initial conditions. By means of a proper mathematical procedure, the mass properties of the body are accurately measured within a very short time. The InTenso+ System has been employed for a number of measurements of the mass properties of road vehicles. In this paper, the measured data are collected and analyzed. Formulas for the estimation of the mass properties (mass, centre of gravity location and inertia tensor) from easily accessible vehicle data are proposed and tested against the measured values. It is confirmed that the mass properties coming from the considered estimations are useless if accurate simulations of the dynamic behavior of a vehicle have to be performed.

The knowledge of the inertia properties of rigid bodies is of crucial importance for the correct simulation of complex mechanical systems. For this purpose at the Politecnico di Milano (Technical university of Milan) a series of test rigs have been constructed for the measurement of mass, centre of gravity location and inertia tensor of rigid bodies with masses ranging from 50 to 3500 kg. The test rigs are basically three or four bar pendulums carrying the body under investigation. The body is made to rotate around three axes passing nearby the body centre of gravity and the resulting highly non linear motion is recorded. A mathematical model simulating the motion of the body carried by the pendulum is used to identify the full inertia tensor by minimising the error between the computed and measured data. These test rigs are currently used for the identification of the mass properties of different cars, light farm tractors, engines, gearboxes and satellites. In this paper a new implementation of these test rigs is shown. By redesigning the instrumentation setup and with a new mathematical procedure for the identification, the test rigs can be used to identify the centre of gravity location and the inertia tensor with a single experimental test. In the new configuration the test rigs require a very short testing time and they are suitable for commercial development.