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The production and maintenance of road pavements consume resources and produce wastes that are disposed of in landfills. To make more sustainable this activity, we have envisioned a method based on a circular use of residues (oil and char) from municipal solid waste pyrolysis as useful additives for producing improved asphalts and for recycling old asphalts to generate new ones, reducing at the same time the consumption of resources for the production of new road pavements and the disposal of wastes to landfills. This work aims to show the feasibility of the integration of two processes (thermal treatment of municipal solid waste on one side, and that of road pavement production on the other side) where the products deriving from waste pyrolysis become added-value materials to improve the quality of road pavements. In this contribution, we presented the effect of pyrolysis product addition on asphalt binder (bitumen) preparation and aging. Solid and liquid products, deriving from the pyrolysis of two kinds of wastes (refused derived fuel (RDF) and granulated rubber tyre waste), have been used for the preparation of asphalt binder samples. Rheological tests have been performed to determine the mechanical properties of neat asphalt binder (bitumen) and those enriched with pyrolysis derived products. Measurements to evaluate possible anti-aging effects have been also performed. The collected results indicate that char addition strengthens the overall bitumen intermolecular structure while bio-oil addition exerts a rejuvenating activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CO2 adsorption on solid sorbents under dynamic conditions is driven by a number of factors, among them textural features (pore volumes, pore size distribution, surface area...), surface chemistry (polarity, presence of active site and/or unsaturated coordinative sites...) and the overall active sites accessibility. Depending on the strength of the interaction with CO2 (chemisorption or physisorption), solid sorbents are broadly divided in two groups, although a sharp distinction between the two phenomena (in many cases concurrent) is obviously not possible. CO2 adsorption data acquired in a lab-scale fixed bed reactor under dynamic conditions and in typical conditions of post-combustion CO2 capture on materials produced from the work-up of carbonized rice husk were here reported and compared with pertinent literature on commercial and ad-hoc synthetized sorbents. Some attempts to correlate adsorption capacities and materials' textural properties or other relevant adsorption parameters have been also proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon black (CB) is an old-concept but versatile carbonaceous material prone to be structurally and chemically modified under quite mild wet conditions. Recently, we exploited the potentiality of CB for the production of a highly varied array of advanced materials with applications in energetics, water remediation and sensoristic. The proposed approaches are devised to meet specific needs: low production costs, scalable synthetic approaches, flexibility i.e. easy tuning of chemico-physical properties of the carbon-based advanced materials. Two main approaches have been exploited: modification of CB at the surface and highly CB de-structuration. The former approach allows obtaining highly homogenous CB-modified nanoparticles (around 160 nm) with tunable surface properties (hydrophilicity, typology of functional groups and surface charge density, pore size distribution), supports for ionic liquid (SILP) and composites (carbon-iron oxide). The latter approach exploiting a top-down demolition of CB produces a highly versatile graphene related material (GRM), made up by stacked short graphene-like layers (GL) particularly suitable for advanced composites synthesis and ultrathin carbon-based films production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autoimmune diseases are complex disorders of unknown etiology thought to result from interactions between genetic and environmental factors. We aimed to verify whether environmental pollution from diesel engine exhaust nanoparticulate (DEP) of actually operating vehicles could play a role in the development of a rare immune-mediated disease, systemic sclerosis (SSc), in which the pathogenetic role of environment has been highlighted. The effects of carbon-based nanoparticulate collected at the exhaust of newer (Euro 5) and older (Euro 4) diesel engines on SSc skin keratinocytes and fibroblasts were evaluated in vitro by assessing the mRNA expression of inflammatory cytokines (IL-1α, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α) and fibroblast chemical mediators (metalloproteases 2, 3, 7, 9, and 12; collagen types I and III;VEGF).DEP was shown to stimulate cytokine gene expression at a higher extent in SSc keratinocytes versus normal cells. Moreover, them RNA gene expression of all MMPs, collagen types, and VEGF genes was significantly higher in untreated SSc fibroblasts versus controls. Euro 5 particle exposure increased the mRNA expression of MMP-2, -7, and -9 in SSc fibroblasts in a dose dependent manner and only at the highest concentration in normal cells. We suggest that environmental DEP could trigger the development of SSc acting on genetically hyperreactive cell systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autoimmune diseases are complex disorders of unknown etiology thought to result from interactions between genetic and environmental factors. We aimed to verify whether environmental pollution from diesel engine exhaust nanoparticulate (DEP) of actually operating vehicles could play a role in the development of a rare immune-mediated disease, systemic sclerosis (SSc), in which the pathogenetic role of environment has been highlighted. The effects of carbon-based nanoparticulate collected at the exhaust of newer (Euro 5) and older (Euro 4) diesel engines on SSc skin keratinocytes and fibroblasts were evaluated in vitro by assessing the mRNA expression of inflammatory cytokines (IL-1 α , IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α) and fibroblast chemical mediators (metalloproteases 2, 3, 7, 9, and 12; collagen types I and III; VEGF). DEP was shown to stimulate cytokine gene expression at a higher extent in SSc keratinocytes versus normal cells. Moreover, the mRNA gene expression of all MMPs, collagen types, and VEGF genes was significantly higher in untreated SSc fibroblasts versus controls. Euro 5 particle exposure increased the mRNA expression of MMP-2, -7, and -9 in SSc fibroblasts in a dose dependent manner and only at the highest concentration in normal cells. We suggest that environmental DEP could trigger the development of SSc acting on genetically hyperreactive cell systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]