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Human comfort outdoors is widely investigated, but most studies explore the comfort domains singularly. This paper aimed to evaluate human comfort in parks, verifying the importance of using a multi-domain (simultaneously evaluating thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality) and multi-disciplinary (combining environmental and social fields) approach. A walk through a pre-defined path from one park to another was repeated twice per day on four consecutive days in June, with three participants per walk. The two investigated parks are in central Italy and were chosen because they differ in their design and spatial characteristics. Environmental data were recorded with an innovative wearable device during the whole walk, and surveys were used to assess people’s perceptions of the parks. Despite observed differences in collected physical parameters, the survey’s responses were similar, and different comfort domains showed dependence on each other in the two parks. Logistic regression models were developed for each park, and they revealed that the qualitative information predicted the overall comfort level more accurately than the environmental data. In detail, the models based on environmental data resulted in R2 equal to 0.126 and 0.111 in Parks 1 and 2, respectively, whereas using the survey answers increased it up to 0.820 (Park 1) and 0.806 (Park 2). This study contributes to addressing the gap in multi-domain comfort studies outdoors and confirms the importance of using multi-disciplinary and multi-domain approaches for a complete comfort analysis, supporting holistic human-biometeorology-oriented models and forecasting opportunities that can promote improvements in urban environmental quality and liveability

The built environment is particularly sensitive to elevated temperatures across urban areas. Furthermore, engineered materials usually amplify surface overheating, exacerbating urban heat island and cooling energy needs. In the last decades, the scientific community introduced a new class of materials, i.e. cool materials, in the attempt of mitigating these phenomena. In this context, this work investigates the hygrothermal and radiative potential of phosphorescent-based paving solutions and benchmarks their performance against commercially available cool concrete. To this end, an extensive outdoor monitoring campaign was carried out in terms of surface/air temperature, relative humidity, reflected solar radiation and wind speed/direction during summer 2019. Phosphorescent-based fields were found to maintain lower superficial temperature than the reference during the hottest hours of the day, by up to 0.9 ° C and 3.3 ° C in terms of average and absolute values, respectively. Even though other cooling techniques have been found to have higher cooling effect, the outcomes of this study, reveal for a first time, (i) the promising thermal behavior of phosphorescent-based pavements, as well as (ii) their potential for developing advanced cool materials equipped with both radiation reflection and re-emission mechanisms.

Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) could be utilized for a wide range of applications such as sorption, catalysis, chromatography, energy storage, sensors, drug delivery, and nonlinear optics. However, to date, there are very few examples of MOFs exploited on a commercial scale. Nevertheless, progress in MOF-related research is currently paving the way to new industrial opportunities, fostering applications and processes interconnecting fundamental chemistry with engineering and relevant sectors. Yet, the fabrication of porous MOF materials within resistant structures is a key challenge impeding their wide commercial use for processes such as adsorptive separation. In fact, the integration of nano-scale MOF crystallic structures into bulk components that can maintain the desired characteristics, i.e., size, shape, and mechanical stability, is a prerequisite for their wide practical use in many applications. At the same time, it requires sophisticated shaping techniques that can structure nano/micro-crystalline fine powders of MOFs into diverse types of macroscopic bodies such as monoliths. Under this framework, this review aims to bridge the gap between research advances and industrial necessities for fostering MOF applications into real life. Therefore, it critically explores recent advances in the shaping and production of MOF macro structures with regard to the binding materials that have received little attention to date, but have the potential to give new perspectives in the industrial applicability of MOFs. Moreover, it proposes future paths that can be adopted from both academy and industry and can further boost MOF exploitation.

Pavements affect theurban microclimateand the overall quality of the outdoor environment. Cool pavements, in particular, can guarantee lower surface temperature than conventional ones, e.g. asphalt and concrete. These solutions often comprise reflective coatings placed above existing pavements or more complex configurations, i.e. evaporative and heat harvesting solutions. This study investigates in-field the thermo-optical profiles of cool paving systems made with a novel modifiedepoxy resinbinder. Unlike classic binders, the presented binder is transparent and, when combined with the proper aggregate minimizes its contribution to local surface overheating phenomena. The two novel fields presented herein were found to maintain up to 9.2°C and 6.4°C lower surface temperature during daytime and up to 8.4°C and 4.6°C lower surface temperature during nighttime as compared to the asphalt and concrete fields, respectively. A cradle-to-gatelife cycle assessmentshowed that the novel binders may also decrease pavements’ footprint on human health and ecosystems, while the application of a CO2off-set model showed their good potentiality to decrease the corresponding emissions. The novel binders, that unlike typical cool paving applications are an integral part of the pavement, are ready to be integrated in real life applications.

Human comfort outdoors is widely investigated, but most studies explore the comfort domains singularly. This paper aimed to evaluate human comfort in parks, verifying the importance of using a multi-domain (simultaneously evaluating thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality) and multi-disciplinary (combining environmental and social fields) approach. A walk through a pre-defined path from one park to another was repeated twice per day on four consecutive days in June, with three participants per walk. The two investigated parks are in central Italy and were chosen because they differ in their design and spatial characteristics. Environmental data were recorded with an innovative wearable device during the whole walk, and surveys were used to assess people’s perceptions of the parks. Despite observed differences in collected physical parameters, the survey’s responses were similar, and different comfort domains showed dependence on each other in the two parks. Logistic regression models were developed for each park, and they revealed that the qualitative information predicted the overall comfort level more accurately than the environmental data. In detail, the models based on environmental data resulted in R2 equal to 0.126 and 0.111 in Parks 1 and 2, respectively, whereas using the survey answers increased it up to 0.820 (Park 1) and 0.806 (Park 2). This study contributes to addressing the gap in multi-domain comfort studies outdoors and confirms the importance of using multi-disciplinary and multi-domain approaches for a complete comfort analysis, supporting holistic human-biometeorology-oriented models and forecasting opportunities that can promote improvements in urban environmental quality and liveability.

Monitoring microclimate variables within cities with high accuracy is an ongoing challenge for a better urban resilience to climate change. Assessing the intra-urban characteristics of a city is of vital importance for ensuring fine living standards for citizens. Here, a novel mobile microclimate station is applied for monitoring the main microclimatic variables regulating urban and intraurban environment, as well as directionally monitoring shortwave radiation and illuminance and hence systematically map for the first time the effect of urban surfaces and anthropogenic heat. We performed day-time and night-time monitoring campaigns within a historical city in Italy, characterized by substantial urban structure differentiations. We found significant intra-urban variations concerning variables such as air temperature and shortwave radiation. Moreover, the proposed experimental framework may capture, for the very first time, significant directional variations with respect to shortwave radiation and illuminance across the city at microclimate scale. The presented mobile station represents therefore the key missing piece for exhaustively identifying urban environmental quality, anthropogenic actions, and data driven modelling toward risk and resilience planning. It can be therefore used in combination with satellite data, stable weather station or other mobile stations, e.g. wearable sensing techniques, through a citizens’ science approach in smart, livable, and sustainable cities in the near future

In this study, photoluminescent glass tiles with different content of yellow-emitting pigments are tested as a promising adaptive strategy for investigating their potential for lighting energy saving and passive cooling in the built environment. The capability of such materials to re-emit light after a certain solicitation period has indeed gained increasing attention as an innovative solution to reduce building energy consumption and mitigate the urban heat island phenomenon. Following this line, photoluminescence is here studied through spectrophotometric and spectroradiometric measurements, during both its charging and decay phase. Analytic corrections are then applied for the first time to isolate only the photoluminescent effect from the overall experimental data. Results demonstrate how higher contents of photoluminescent pigments do not always correspond to the best performance: tiles with an intermediate concentration provide for the longest afterglow decay time (up to 79 min) and the highest reduction in solar energy absorption (up to 26.8 W/m2).

Climate change intensifies the Urban Heat Islands (UHI) in hundreds of cities around the globe. Even though tests on traditional cool materials have shown promising results in terms of UHI mitigation, novel advanced solutions are deemed necessary for strategically counteracting UHI. Unlike traditional materials, phosphorescent materials can not only reflect incident shortwave radiation but also reemit it back, i.e. the phenomenon of phosphorescence. Even though this unique reflection-reemission mechanism known as effective solar reflectance (ESR), has been widely tested for sustainable lightning applications, its cooling potential has been surprisingly overlooked. Here, we examine, in-lab, and numerically, the thermo-optical properties of several phosphorescent coatings of different colours and we evaluate their effective cooling potential. Results reveal that the phosphorescence mechanism could be effectively optimized for obtaining phosphorescent-based coatings with an improved optical performance and hence substantially mitigate surface overheating in the built environment.

In the last twenty years, research activity around the environmental applications of metal–organic frameworks has bloomed due to their CO2 capture ability, tunable properties, porosity, andwell-defined crystalline structure. Thus, hundreds of MOFs have been developed. However, theimpact of their production on the environment has not been investigated as thoroughly as their potential applications. In this work, the environmental performance of various synthetic routes of MOF nanoparticles, in particular ZIF-8, is assessed through a life cycle assessment. For this purpose, five representative synthesis routes were considered, and synthesis data were obtainedbased on available literature. The synthesis included different solvents (de-ionized water, methanol, dimethylformamide) as well as different synthetic steps (i.e., hours of drying, stirring, precursor). Thefindings revealed that the main environmental weak points identified during production were: (a) the use of dimethylformamide (DMF) and methanol (MeOH) as substances impacting environmental sustainability, which accounted for more than 85% of the overall environmental impacts in those synthetic routes where they were utilized as solvents and as cleaning agents at the same time; (b) theelectricity consumption, especially due to the Greek energy mix which is fossil-fuel dependent, andaccounted for up to 13% of the overall environmental impacts in some synthetic routes. Nonetheless,for the optimization of the impacts provided by the energy use, suggestions are made based onthe use of alternative, cleaner renewable energy sources, which (for the case of wind energy) will decrease the impacts by up to 2%.

Although many efforts have been made through past years, skin cancer recognition from medical images is still an active area of research aiming at more accurate results. Many efforts have been made in recent years based on deep learning neural networks. Only a few, however, are based on a single deep learning model and targeted to create a mobile application. Contributing to both efforts, first we present a summary of the required medical knowledge on skin cancer, followed by an extensive summary of the most recent related works. Afterwards, we present 11 CNN (convolutional neural network) candidate single architectures. We train and test those 11 CNN architectures, using the HAM10000 dataset, concerning seven skin lesion classes. To face the imbalance problem and the high similarity between images of some skin lesions, we apply data augmentation (during training), transfer learning and fine-tuning. From the 11 CNN architecture configurations, DenseNet169 produced the best results. It achieved an accuracy of 92.25%, a recall (sensitivity) of 93.59% and an F1-score of 93.27%, which outperforms existing state-of-the-art efforts. We used a light version of DenseNet169 in constructing a mobile android application, which was mapped as a two-class model (benign or malignant). A picture is taken via the mobile device camera, and after manual cropping, it is classified into benign or malignant type. The application can also inform the user about the allowed sun exposition time based on the current UV radiation degree, the phototype of the user’s skin and the degree of the used sunscreen. In conclusion, we achieved state-of-the-art results in skin cancer recognition based on a single, relatively light deep learning model, which we also used in a mobile application.

Urban environment well-being has become a crucial public issue to face, given the huge concentration of population and climate change-related hazards at a city scale. In this view, Urban Heat Island (UHI) is now very well-acknowledged to be able to produce a serious threat topopulations around the world and compromise human well-being due to aggressive overheating, exacerbated by anthropogenic actions. The same anthropogenic actions are also responsible forother discomfort causes such as noise pollution, which has also been demonstrated to heavilyimpact societal life and health conditions in urban systems. Both these phenomena typicallyco-exist in terms of space and time coincidence, and they both may be mitigated by means of smart adaptive and multifunctional surfaces including urban pavements and building envelopes. Thisreview bridges the gap between only-thermophysical analysis about UHI mitigation andonly-acoustics analysis of urban noise pollution, here defined as Urban Noise Island (UNI). To thisaim, the key physics background of mitigation techniques is presented and the most innovative and promising solutions for counteracting UHI and UNI are described, with the final purpose to foster research and innovation towards more livable cities through a multiphysics and holistic view.

Urbanization and actions are responsible for overheated cities compared to the adjacent rural settings, a phenomenonknown as Urban Heat Island (UHI). Additionally, conventional urban materials contribute towards theaggravation of urban noise pollution, a phenomenon that may be described as Urban Noise Island (UNI).Numerous solutions have been proposed through the implementation of novel, more sustainable, or naturalmaterials in the pavement infrastructure. To that end, this study bridges the gap between UHI and UNI mitigationstrategies, simultaneously ensuring low environmental impact. Therefore, a resin-based pavement binderwas investigated through multiphysics analysis, together with four innovative binders made with waste bio-oils. Thermal, optical, acoustical and Life Cycle Assessment analysis were carried out for gauging the UHI/UNI mitigation potential of binders and their environmental impact. Results showed that the innovative binders preservedgood physical properties: all binders have solar reflectance higher than 50% within 750–1600 nm rangeand sound absorption coefficient higher than 0.8 within 600–800 Hz. Additionally, bio-oils decreased the environmentalimpact of the binder up to 37.46mPt, and 8.33% in the ReCiPe, and Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change analysis, respectively. Therefore, the exploitation of bio-oils in the pavement market can beconsidered as promising green solution for mitigating both UHI and UNI.

The built environment is particularly sensitive to elevated temperatures across urban areas. Furthermore, engineered materials usually amplify surface overheating, exacerbating urban heat island and cooling energy needs. In the last decades, the scientific community introduced a new class of materials, i.e. cool materials, in theattempt of mitigating these phenomena. In this context, this work investigates the hygrothermal and radiativepotential of phosphorescent-based paving solutions and benchmarks their performance against commerciallyavailable cool concrete. To this end, an extensive outdoor monitoring campaign was carried out in terms ofsurface/air temperature, relative humidity, reflected solar radiation and wind speed/direction during summer 2019. Phosphorescent-based fields were found to maintain lower superficial temperature than the reference during the hottest hours of the day, by up to 0.9 °C and 3.3 °C in terms of average and absolute values, respectively.Even though other cooling techniques have been found to have higher cooling effect, the outcomes ofthis study, reveal for a first time, (i) the promising thermal behavior of phosphorescent-based pavements, as wellas (ii) their potential for developing advanced cool materials equipped with both radiation reflection and reemissionmechanisms.

Existing research suggests that students are an under-reported and undersupported group of the population that frequently lives in fuel poverty. Furthermore, studies show that students do not realize that they live in fuel poor conditions and are rarely recognized as a group vulnerable to fuel poverty. The aim of the research presented in this paper is to understand, evaluate and consequently reveal the experiences of students living in the private-rentedd sector, quantify their possible exposure to fuel poverty, and to determine the impacts of this exposure on their well-being. Three thousand five hundred and twelve students from seven European countries participated in this research making it the largest study to date targeting this specific social group. Our results demonstrate that this group is vulnerable to fuel poverty and that their exposure to such conditions can have a detrimental effect on both their mental and physical health, as well as their social life.