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Cadmium is toxic to humans, although Cd-based quantum dots exerts less toxicity. Human hepatocellular carcinoma cells (HepG2) and macrophages (THP-1) were exposed to ionic Cd, Cd(II), and cadmium sulfide quantum dots (CdS QDs), and cell viability, cell integrity, Cd accumulation, mitochondrial function and miRNome profile were evaluated. Cell-type and Cd form-specific responses were found: CdS QDs affected cell viability more in HepG2 than in THP-1; respective IC20 values were ∼3 and ∼50 μg ml−1. In both cell types, Cd(II) exerted greater effects on viability. Mitochondrial membrane function in HepG2 cells was reduced 70 % with 40 μg ml−1 CdS QDs but was totally inhibited by Cd(II) at corresponding amounts. In THP-1 cells, CdS QDs has less effect on mitochondrial function; 50 μg ml-1 CdS QDs or equivalent Cd(II) caused 30 % reduction or total inhibition, respectively. The different in vitro effects of CdS QDs were unrelated to Cd uptake, which was greater in THP-1 cells. For both cell types, changes in the expression of miRNAs (miR-222, miR-181a, miR-142-3p, miR-15) were found with CdS QDs, which may be used as biomarkers of hazard nanomaterial exposure. The cell-specific miRNome profiles were indicative of a more conservative autophagic response in THP-1 and as apoptosis as in HepG2.

Many systems in nature, society and technology are composed of numerous interacting parts. Very often these dynamics lead to the formation of medium-level structures, whose detection could allow a high-level description of the dynamical organization of the system itself, and thus to its understanding. In this work we apply this idea to the “cancer evolution” models, of which each individual patient represents a particular instance. This approach - in this paper based on the RI methodology, which is based on entropic measures - allows us to identify distinct independent cancer progression patterns in simulated patients, planning a road towards applications to real cases .

This paper refers to the passive and reactive control of power-take-off (PTO) systems involved in wave energy conversion. A point-absorber device (buoy) is considered. After a brief introduction of the principles of marine wave-buoy interaction, the passive and reactive controls of the PTO systems are recalled. For each control strategy, the analytical relations for maximizing the power extracted by the wave and the electrical power provided by an active-controlled electrical PTO are defined and verified by simulation. Then, an experimental set-up of a small-scale laboratory simulator of the wave energy conversion system is also implemented. Two vector-controlled PM synchronous machines joined without mechanical backlash are used, one to simulate the wave excitation force and the other the PTO engine. The experimental tests confirm the possibility to extract maximum power by proper setting of the control parameters.

Textile organic electrochemical transistors (txOECTs) are a new class of wearable biosensors used to monitor physiological parameters in bio fluids of clinical interest. Herein the selectivity of a textile biosensor was improved directly functionalizing the textile device with ion selective membranes. The device was prepared by a series of consecutive functionalization of the textile fiber, first by applying the conductive polymer poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly (styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) and subsequently the ion selective membrane based on different ionophores with the aim of measuring electrolytes in sweat. The ion selective membranes were previously tested and optimized by potentiometric measurements. The biosensor devices were studied with different concentration of electrolytes. Membrane selectivity was tested comparing transistor response with interfering ions, proving successfully the selective response to sodium, potassium and calcium ions. The ability of the textile biosensors to discriminate among the cations was demonstrated over the 10−5 - 1 M concentration range, a concentration range found in sweat. The electronic parameters of the txOECTs show differences not only in modulation response but also in time constants of kinetic behavior. The selective determination of potassium and calcium in sweat has a great importance in different applications, for example, in human sweat monitoring, to understand physiological conditions, like dehydration, cardiac bioactivity and hypokalemia.

Dissemination materials used by ReFreeDrive project partners at Coiltech 2019 fair

Engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) have found applications in different fields varying from medical science to electronics. The increasing interest in these materials, fuelled by the potential benefits of their use, has not as yet been matched by a concerted effort to gain a full understanding of potential negative effects they may have on the environment and on human health. In a biological environment, ENPs become coated by a so-called “protein corona”, the structure of which defines their biological identity. The present research set out to characterize the interaction between cadmium sulphide quantum dots (QDs) and yeast cells, isolating and identifying the set of proteins which were adsorbed on the QD surface using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry followed by an in silico protein analysis. Ring-shaped proteins were particularly prone to binding, and electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions were central for this interaction. QDs strongly increased the transcript levels of genes encoding the major hard corona proteins indicating a mechanism of genetic compensation in response to the “physical sequestration” of these proteins in the QD corona in vivo. The toxicological implications of the protein corona formation were explored using yeast mutant strains carrying deletions in genes encoding the corona proteins. Interestingly, these mutants were tolerant to doses of QDs that were lethal to wild type cells. These results reveal that the hard protein corona mediates the toxicity of QDs in yeast and a major resolution of this interaction at the molecular level is crucial for a better understanding of the in vivo response of ENPs.

Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a dynamical regime between order and disorder attain the highest level of computational capabilities and achieve an optimal trade-off between robustness and flexibility. Recent results in cellular and evolutionary biology, neuroscience and computer science have revitalised the interest in the criticality hypothesis, emphasising its role as a viable candidate general law in adaptive complex systems. In this paper we provide an overview of the works on dynamical criticality that are -to the best of our knowledge- particularly relevant for the criticality hypothesis. We review the main contributions concerning dynamics and information processing at the edge of chaos, and we illustrate the main achievements in the study of critical dynamics in biological systems. Finally, we discuss open questions and propose an agenda for future work., Added references, rephrased some sentences and corrected typos

Low oxygen conditions occur in grass sites due to high and frequent precipitation, poor soil quality, and over-irrigation followed by slow drainage. Three warm-season and one cool-season grasses were analyzed at metabolic level during a time-course experiment performed in a controlled anoxic environment. Prolonged oxygen depletion proved detrimental by leading to premature death to all the species, with the exception of seashore paspalum. Moreover, the anoxia tolerance observed in these grasses has been associated with slow use of carbohydrates, rather than with their relative abundance, which was more important than their antioxidant capacity. Further physiological characterization of eight seashore paspalum genotypes to anoxia was also performed, by examining the variation in photosystem II (PSII) efficiency and gas exchange during post-anoxia recovery. Multivariate analysis highlighted the presence of three main clusters of seashore paspalum genotypes, characterized by different ability to restore the PSII photochemistry during recovery after one day of anoxia. Taken together, our data demonstrate that the analysis of post-anoxia recovery of fluorescence and gas exchange parameters can represent a fast and reliable indicator for selecting species and cultivars more able to acclimate their photosynthetic apparatus.

Commercial carbon fibers have been coated by a brush-like layer of ZnO nanowires using a seeded chemical bath deposition. Both single carbon fibers or large tows can be functionalized in such a way. Exploiting the electrical conductivity of carbon fibers and the functional properties of ZnO nanostructures, we demonstrated that the intersection at the crossing of two functionalized carbon fibers can act not only as a piezoelectric strain sensor, but also as a chemoresistive gas sensor. The small volume of added nanostructures prevents delamination issues. The “crossing” configuration, which is typical of carbon fiber fabrics used for composites, paves the way to transform a typical texture with simple mechanical and structural properties into a “smart” material with noninvasive integrated arrays of micron-scale sensors.

Executive Summary corresponding to the ReFreeDrive project deliverable D4.2: "SynRel Electro Magnetic Design Track1 / Track2"

Executive Summary corresponding to the ReFreeDrive project deliverable D4.4: "SynRel Full Design Track1 / Track2"

Executive Summary corresponding to the ReFreeDrive project deliverable D4.1: "SynRel Preliminary Analysis"

Executive Summary corresponding to the ReFreeDriveMidterm Project Report

The growth of a population of protocells requires that the two key processes of replication of the protogenetic material and reproduction of the whole protocell take place at the same rate. While in many ODE-based models such synchronization spontaneously develops, this does not happen in the important case of quadratic growth terms. Here we show that spontaneous synchronization can be recovered (i) by requiring that the transmembrane diffusion of precursors takes place at a finite rate, or (ii) by introducing a finite lifetime of the molecular complexes. We then consider reaction networks that grow by the addition of newly synthesized chemicals in a binary polymer model, and analyze their behaviors in growing and dividing protocells, thereby confirming the importance of (i) and (ii) for synchronization. We describe some interesting phenomena (like long-term oscillations of duplication times) and show that the presence of food-generated autocatalytic cycles is not sufficient to guarantee synchronization: in the case of cycles with a complex structure, it is often observed that only some subcycles survive and synchronize, while others die out. This shows the importance of truly dynamic models that can uncover effects that cannot be detected by static graph theoretical analyses.

The differential mechanisms of CdS QDs (Quantum Dots) and Cd ion toxicity to Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh were investigated. Plants were exposed to 40 and 60 mg L−1 for CdS QDs and 76.9 and 115.2 mg L−1 CdSO4·7H2O and toxicity was evaluated at 5, 20, 35 (T5, T20, T35) days after exposure. Oxidative stress upon exposure was evaluated by biochemical essays targeting non-enzymatic oxidative stress physiological parameters, including respiration efficiency, total chlorophylls, carotenoids, ABTS and DPPH radicals reduction, total phenolics, GSH redox state, lipid peroxidation. Total Cd in plants was measured with AAS. Root and leaf morphology and element content were assessed in vivo utilizing low-vacuum Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy (ESEM) with X-ray microanalysis (EDX). This integrated approach allowed identification of unique nanoscale CdS QDs toxicity to the plants that was distinct from CdSO4 exposure. The analyses highlighted that CdS QDs and Cd ions effects are modulated by the developmental stage of the plant, starting from T20 till T35 the plant development was modulated by the treatments, in particular CdS QDs induced early flowering. Both treatments induced Fe accumulation in roots, but at different intensities, while CdS QDs was associated with Mn increase into plant leaf. CdSO4 elicited higher levels of oxidative stress compared with QDs, especially the former treatment caused more intense respiration damages and reduction in chlorophyll and carotenoids than the latter. The two types of treatments impact differently on root and leaf morphology.

A long-standing goal of neuroscience is a theory that explains the formation of the minicolumns in the cerebral cortex. Minicolumns are the elementary computational units of the mature neocortex. Here, we use zinc oxide nanowires with controlled topography as substrates for neural-cell growth. We observe that neuronal cells form networks where the networks characteristics exhibit a high sensitivity to the topography of the nanowires. For certain values of nanowires density and fractal dimension, neuronal networks express small world attributes, with enhanced information flows. We observe that neurons in these networks congregate in superclusters of approximately 200 neurons. We demonstrate that this number is not coincidental: the maximum number of cells in a supercluster is limited by the competition between the binding energy between cells, adhesion to the substrate, and the kinetic energy of the system. Since cortical minicolumns have similar size, similar anatomical and topological characteristics of neuronal superclusters on nanowires surfaces, we conjecture that the formation of cortical minicolumns is likewise guided by the interplay between energy minimization, information optimization and topology. For the first time, we provide a clear account of the mechanisms of formation of the minicolumns in the brain.

Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructures can be grown in different morphologies by means of a wide range of techniques. Although the strong evidence of their gas sensing capabilities has been reported in several papers, not all of them are suitable for a large-scale or industrial scale production of gas sensor devices. Among the several ZnO nanostructures that have been grown so far at IMEM-CNR Institute, we focused our attention on tetrapods (TPs), because a vapour phase growth process that can produce grams of these nanostructures have been designed and optimized in our laboratories. This quantity of nanostructures, produced in a small lab-scale reactor, is enough to prepare several thousands of gas sensing devices. Moreover, the produced ZnO-TPs are free-standing and not constrained to a growth substrate, and can be easily suspended in a liquid media. The highly-porous entangled network of ZnO-TPs, which can be obtained by direct deposition on sensor substrate, demonstrated to efficiently work as chemoresistor, while its sensing properties (sensitivity, selectivity, ...) can be tuned or modified through the functionalization of TPs surface with other materials (noble metals, inorganic semiconductor nanoparticles, organic semiconductor layers). At the same time, ZnO nanostructures and their multifunctional properties can be used to functionalize the surface of other materials and, eventually, add to them sensing capabilities. As a meaningful example, we can illustrate the adding of ZnO nanorods (ZnO-NRs) to the surface of carbon fibers with a wet chemical process that is easily scalable to a larger scale. It has been recently demonstrated that two crossing ZnO-functionalized carbon fibers can be used to sense and transduce a piezoelectric signal or UV light, as well as a chemoresistive information.

This paper deals with the design of a Synchronous Reluctance motor for full-electric vehicle applications. In particular, the design is focused on premium vehicles and aims at the development of rare-earth free electric motor technologies featuring low cost manufacturing. Different solutions are proposed and compared with focus on the rotor design; the investigated topologies employ asymmetric rotor structures with "fluid shaped" barriers without radial ribs to maximize the average torque and minimize the torque ripple. As this choice is very critical for the mechanical strength of the rotor core at high speed, it has been decided to fill the flux barriers with epoxy adhesive resin. The use of the resin has required an accurate mechanical analysis in order to assess the rotor robustness at high speed.The paper presents the performances of the optimized design and the efficiency and torque ripple maps: moreover, useful information on the use of the epoxy resin in the synchronous reluctance motor are provided.

Cellular types of multicellular organisms are the stable results of complex intertwined processes that occur in biological cells. Among the many others, chromatin dynamics significantly contributes...

This paper deals with the optimisation of a 200kW, 20krpm machine for an electric vehicle application using Motor-CAD and optiSLang software. The main goal of the research is to design a low cost, rare-earth free magnet motor while ensuring mass production feasibility and providing higher performance than current available technologies. The induction motor with copper rotor cage, either die-casted or fabricated, is selected as a potential candidate. The stator winding is of hairpin type and both rotor and stator parts benefit from direct cooling. The machine is optimised electromagnetically and thermally to meet the peak and continuous performance requirements with respect to the project specifications. In particular, the efficiency computation over the typical WLTP3 drive cycle is considered in the optimisation process. The latter is looked into details and uses a meta-model based approach which allows to evaluate thousands of design topologies in a computationally efficient way for a given optimisation scenario.

The aim of this paper is to optimize the design of multiple flux barriers Synchronous Reluctance Motor in order to smooth the torque profile without rotor skewing. A new strategy is proposed by modelling the particular optimal design problem as mixed integer constrained minimization of a suitable objective function. The procedure has allowed to optimize the rotor shape for minimum torque ripple starting from an existing stator core.

Diatomaceous earth, or diatomite, is produced through the accumulation of diatom (Bacillariophyceae) skeletons (i.e. cell walls called frustules) made of amorphous silica. The porous, highly symmetrical structure and microscopic size of diatom cell walls make them ideal constituents of sensing devices and analytical chips. Here, we propose chemical methods to purify diatom frustules extracted from diatomaceous earth. Using photo deposition techniques, we grow gold nanoparticles on the surface of diatom skeletons and within the pores of the skeletons, where the size and density of nanoparticles can be controlled by changing the parameters of the synthesis. Resulting devices have an internal porous structure that can harvest molecules from a solution, and an external shell of gold nanoparticles that amplifies the electromagnetic field generated by the measurement laser in Raman or other spectroscopies. The combination of these effects enables the analysis of biological specimens, chemical analytes and pollutants in extremely low abundance ranges. The devices were demonstrated in the analysis of Bovine Serum Albumin in water with a concentration of 100 aM, and mineral oil with a concentration of 50 ppm. Keywords: Diatomite, Diatoms, Photo-deposition, Gold nanoparticles, SERS, Bio-sensors

This paper deals with the design of high-speed Synchronous Reluctance motors for electric vehicle applications. The need to enhance power density and lowering costs leads to the design of high speed motors with a reduced amount of rare earth. Pure synchronous reluctance motors potentially operate at high speed and exhibit a low cost rotor compared to PM and induction motors. Nevertheless, they present reduced performances in deep flux weakening operations in particular when the so-called radial ribs are introduced to increase the mechanical robustness of the rotor. In this paper the adoption of the radial ribs in the related design challenges are investigated and discussed. The adoption of a suitable commercial optimization tool able to optimize the placement and the sizing of the radial ribs is presented. The approach leads to an original positioning of the radial ribs able to preserve the performances of the motor at high operating speed enhancing the mechanical integrity of the rotor.

The Relevance Index has been introduced to detect key features of the organisation of complex dynamical systems. It is based upon Shannon entropies and can be used to identify groups of variables that change in a coordinated fashion, while they are less integrated with the rest of the system. In previous work, we have shown that the average Relevance Index attains its maximum at the phase transition in both Ising model and random Boolean networks. In this contribution we present a further study on the Ising model, showing that the relevance index is maximised for large groups of variables at criticality. These results provide further evidence to the hypothesis that this index is a powerful measure for capturing criticality.

Nanomaterial-specific response of quantum dots and the underlying mechanisms of their interaction with plants are poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the mechanism of cadmium sulfide-quantum dot (CdS-QD) uptake and stress response in soybean (Glycine max) plants using sensitive bio-analytical techniques. We adopted shotgun-proteomics and targeted analysis of metabolites and gene expression in the tissues of soybean plants exposed to 200 mg L−1 CdS-QDs in vermiculite for 14 days. The molecular response in the soybeans as a function of surface coatings on CdS-QDs, specifically, trioctylphosphine oxide, polyvinylpyrrolidone, mercaptoacetic acid and glycine was also tested. The biological response of CdS-QDs was compared to Cd-ions and bulk-CdS to identify the nanomaterial-specific response. The transmembrane proteins involved in uptake and genes including NRAMP6 and HMA8 were regulated differently in CdS-QD-treated plants compared to Cd-ion-treated plants. The ATP-dependent ion-transporters in the membranes presented feedback mechanisms in the soybean roots to restrict the uptake of CdS-QDs and simultaneously altered the mineral acquisition. CdS-QDs perturbed major metabolic pathways in soybeans including glutathione metabolism, tricarboxylic acid cycle, glycolysis, fatty acid oxidation and biosynthesis of phenylpropanoid and amino acids. This study provides clear evidence that the toxic responses and tolerance mechanisms in plants are specific to CdS-QD exposure and not entirely due to leaching of Cd ions.

The detection of critical states is a task of utmost importance in complex systems; to this aim, measures to identify such conditions are required. In general, the term criticality concerns the exi...

A piezoelectric investigation of a nano-engineered transducer consisting of zinc oxide nanorods grown in situ on carbon fibers has been performed by means of dynamic hysteresis and capacitance measurements. The device has been stimulated using both static and dynamic stress: the occurrence of characteristic current vs voltage polarization lobes of a ferroelectric material (stressed piezoelectric) and the corresponding saturation polarization of 290 mC cm-2 (at 2.4 V mm-1 electric field) have been recorded under static stress application. Under dynamic stress conditions a 400% capacitance increase has been measured with respect to the unstressed device. It is noteworthy that these results have been achieved using the carbon fiber itself as conductive element, without the need for external wiring, providing a true integration of the piezoelectric transducer into carbon fiber based materials. The presented nano- engineered device acts as stress sensor and can actively react to the applied stress to hinder the deformation, enabling the design of smart carbon fiber based composites.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

In the last years the line-start synchronous motors have gained a growing interest thanks to the remarkable energy efficiency, since the operation at synchronous speed ensures the absence of losses in the squirrel cage at steady state. Typical application fields are fans, pumps, compressors and textile industry. Many papers propose line-start PM motors, due to their high efficiency and power density: rare earths magnets feat to this role thanks to the good coercive force, but they are also characterized by very high prices. Moreover, the price volatility of these alloys represents a drawback for mass production. On the other hand, line-start synchronous reluctance machines are very cost-effective and easy to manufacture, and they can compete with the induction motor in terms of reliability and cost. In this paper the design of a high efficiency 3 kW, 2 poles, frame size IEC 100 motor is proposed. A new design procedure is introduced and an optimization algorithm is applied. Two different geometries have been developed and compared, leading to a final design. The capability of the machine both during the starting transient and steady state operation has been analyzed.

This paper describes the design of a Synchronous Reluctance (SynR) Machine for a Flywheel Based Energy Storage System (FBESS). A preliminary design has been obtained and has been structurally and electromagnetically analyzed by FEM analysis. In order to improve the machine performance, an optimization process has been developed and the optimized design has been analyzed, in order to characterize the overall working range in generator and motor mode.

Diatom shells are a natural, theoretically unlimited material composed of silicon dioxide, with regular patterns of pores penetrating through their surface. For their characteristics, diatom shells show promise to be used as low cost, highly efficient drug carriers, sensor devices or other micro-devices. Here, we demonstrate diatom shells functionalized with gold nanoparticles for the harvesting and detection of biological analytes (bovine serum albumin—BSA) and chemical pollutants (mineral oil) in low abundance ranges, for applications in bioengineering, medicine, safety, and pollution monitoring. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s11671-018-2507-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The growing demand of high-performance motors requires the definition of more accurate design procedures. The only possibility to obtain such kind of results is to combine Finite Element programs with optimization procedures. For this reason, a multi-objective optimization algorithm has been developed, and it has been used to design a Synchronous Reluctance Motor with flux barriers rotor, starting from the stator core of a commercial three-phase induction motor of equivalent size. Based on the optimization results, a prototype has been built and tested.

Recently a cell differentiation model based on noisy random Boolean networks has been proposed. This mathematical model is able to describe in an elegant way the most relevant features of cell differentiation. Noise plays a key role in this model; the different stages of the differentiation process are emergent dynamical configurations deriving from the control of the intracellular noise level. In this work we compare two approaches to this cell differentiation framework: the first one (already present in the literature) is focused on a network analysis representing the average wandering of the system among its attractors, whereas the second (new) approach takes into consideration the dynamical stories of thousands of individual cells. Results showed that under a particular noise condition the two approaches produce comparable results. Therefore both can be used to model the cell differentiation process in an integrative and complementary manner.

The physical and operating principle of a stress sensor, based on two crossing carbon fibers functionalized with ZnO nanorod-shaped nanostructures, was recently demonstrated. The functionalization process has been here extended to tows made of one thousand fibers, like those commonly used in industrial processing, to prove the idea that the same working principle can be exploited in the creation of smart sensing carbon fiber composites. A stress-sensing device made of two functionalized tows, fixed with epoxy resin and crossing like in a typical carbon fiber texture, was successfully tested. Piezoelectric properties of single nanorods, as well as those of the test device, were measured and discussed.

Protocells should be similar to present-day biological cells, but much simpler. They are believed to have played a key role in the origin of life, and they may also be the basis of a new technology with tremendous opportunities. In this work we study the effect of uneven division processes on the synchronization of the duplication rates of protocells’ membrane and internal materials.

A well-known hypothesis, with far-reaching implications, is that biological evolution should preferentially lead to states that are dynamically critical. In previous papers, we showed that a well-known model of genetic regulatory networks, namely, that of random Boolean networks, allows one to study in depth the relationship between the dynamical regime of a living being’s gene network and its response to permanent perturbations. In this paper, we analyze a huge set of new experimental data on single gene knockouts in S. cerevisiae, laying down a statistical framework to determine its dynamical regime. We find that the S. cerevisiae network appears to be slightly ordered, but close to the critical region. Since our analysis relies on dichotomizing continuous data, we carefully consider the issue of an optimal threshold choice.

Methods based on information theory, such as the Relevance Index (RI), have been employed to study complex systems for their ability to detect significant groups of variables, well integrated among one another and well separated from the others, which provide a functional block description of the system under analysis. The integration (or zI in its standardized form) is a metric that can express the significance of a group of variables for the system under consideration: the higher the zI, the more significant the group. In this paper, we use this metric for an unusual application to a pattern clustering and classification problem. The results show that the centroids of the clusters of patterns identified by the method are effective for distance-based classification algorithms. We compare such a method with other conventional classification approaches to highlight its main features and to address future research towards the refinement of its accuracy and computational efficiency.

A major limitation of the classical random Boolean network model of gene regulatory networks is its synchronous updating, which implies that all the proteins decay at the same rate. Here a model is discussed, where the network is composed of two different sets of nodes, labelled G and P with reference to “genes” and “proteins”. Each gene corresponds to a protein (the one it codes for), while several proteins can simultaneously affect the expression of a gene. Both kinds of nodes take Boolean values. If we look at the genes only, it is like adding some memory terms, so the new state of the gene subnetwork network does no longer depend upon its previous state only.

Despite a well-known topic no many practical applications are on the market coupling flywheels and synchronous reluctance machine. The paper outlines the design of a Synchronous Reluctance Machine for a Flywheel Based Energy Storage System (FBESS) addressed for a design-to-cost and market application. A preliminary design has been sized evaluating mechanical and electromagnetic performance thanks to FEM analysis. An accurate review of the results has been done in order to identify the most critical design variables and their impact on machine performance. This analysis aimed to provide an elaborated input to the optimization process. The optimization pointed out to improve the efficiency and the result has been verified through FEM analysis characterizing the machine performance in its overall working range.

Many complex systems, both natural and artificial, may be represented by networks of interacting nodes. Nevertheless, it is often difficult to find meaningful correspondences between the dynamics expressed by these systems and the topological description of their networks. In contrast, many of these systems may be well described in terms of coordinated behavior of their dynamically relevant parts. In this paper we use the recently proposed Relevance Index approach, based on information-theoretic measures. Starting from the observation of the dynamical states of any system, the Relevance Index is able to provide information about its organization. Moreover, we show how the application of the proposed approach leads to novel and effective interpretations in the T helper network case study.

This paper concerns the development of a sensorless controller for synchronous reluctance motors based on finite elements model results. A hybrid solution is used, which includes an adaptive observer for not-zero speed operation and signal injection for standstill. The observer detects the flux linkages components in the two-phase stationary reference frame by the voltage model integration and closed loop correction feedback. This last is provided by a non-linear model of the rotor-fixed frame flux components achieved by finite elements computations. The rotor speed and position are identified by a phase-locked-loop algorithm. To improve the observer performance, the mechanical model is considered, which accounts for the finite elements mapping of the motor torque. The study is applied to a prototype of synchronous reluctance motor with flux barriers rotor, designed to have the same stator core of a commercial three-phase 3kW induction motor. Both realistic simulations (accounting for the non-linear machine behavior) and experimental test are presented, showing the performance of the proposed solution.