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International audience; Background: Recent initiatives in Europe have encouraged the formalisation of research infrastructure to unify fragmented facilities, resources and services; and to facilitate world-class research of complex public health challenges, such as those related to non-communicable disease. How this can be achieved in the area of food and health has, to date, been unclear. Scope and approach: This commentary paper presents examples of the types of food and health research facilities, resources and services available in Europe. Insights are provided on the challenge of identifying and classifying research infrastructure. In addition, suggestions are made for the future direction of food and health research infrastructure in Europe. These views are informed by the EuroDISH project, which mapped research infrastructure in four areas of food and health research: Determinants of dietary behaviour; Intake of foods/nutrients; Status and functional markers of nutritional health; Health and disease risk of foods/nutrients. Key findings and conclusion: There is no objective measure to identify or classify research infrastructure. It is therefore, difficult to operationalise this term. EuroDISH demonstrated specific challenges with identifying the degree an organisation, project, network or national infrastructure could be considered a research infrastructure; and establishing the boundary of a research infrastructure (integral hard or soft facilities/resources/services). Nevertheless, there are opportunities to create dedicated food and health research infrastructures in Europe. These would need to be flexible and adaptable to keep pace with an ever-changing research environment and bring together the multi-disciplinary needs of the food and health research community. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

International audience; This paper presents a global thermal model of the energy conversion of the 10 kW el Eurodish dish/Stirling unit erected at the CNRS-PROMES laboratory in Odeillo. Using optical measurements made by DLR, the losses by parabola reflectivity and spillage are calculated. A nodal method is used to calculate the heat losses in the cavity by conduction, convection, reflection and thermal radiation. A thermodynamic analysis of a SOLO Stirling 161 engine is made. The Stirling engine is divided in 32 control-volumes and equations of ideal gas, mass and energy conservation are written for each control-volume. The differential equation system is resolved by an iterative method developed using Matlab TM programming environment. Temperature, mass, density of working gas, heat transfers and the mechanical power are calculated for one Stirling engine cycle of 40 ms and for a constant direct normal irradiation (DNI). The model gives consistent results correctly fitting with experimental measurements.

The CNRS-Promes dish∕Stirling system was erected in Jun. 2004 as the last of three country reference units built in the “Envirodish” project. It represents the latest development step of the EuroDish system with many improved components. With a measured peak of 11kW electrical output power, it is also the best performing system so far. The measurement campaign to determine the optical and thermodynamic efficiency of the system is presented. The optical quality of the concentrator and the energy input to the power conversion unit was measured with a classical flux-mapping system using a Lambertian target and a charge coupled device camera system. An efficiency of the concentrator including the intercept losses of 74.4% could be defined for this particular system. For the thermodynamic analysis all the data necessary for a complete energy balance around the Stirling engine were measured or approximated by calculations. For the given ambient conditions during the tests, a Stirling engine efficiency of 39.4% could be measured. The overall efficiency for the conversion of solar to electric energy was 22.5%.